My Wild, Wet, and (Sometimes) Miserable Paddling Trip Through the Heart of California

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(Photos: Tom Fowlks)

My Wild, Wet, and (Sometimes) Miserable Paddling Trip Through the Heart of California

Published: Nov 14, 2023 Updated: Dec 4, 2023

Record winter storms turned the Central Valley into a 300-mile long flood zone. We sent a writer and photographer to check out conditions that hadn’t been seen in 40 years.

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The sun had risen above the asthmatic haze of California’s San Joaquin Valley, and the disaster tourists would soon be arriving at the edge of Tulare Lake to take their selfies. It was a Saturday, two days before Memorial Day. County health authorities had warned the public to stay out of the contaminated water, an unwholesome brew of pesticides and animal waste. As for the Kings County sheriff, during media interviews he had informed would-be gawkers that the lake bottom—a vast depression at the southern end of the nation’s breadbasket—was private property. Trespassing rules would be strictly enforced.

Our shuttle driver, Vincent Ruiz—a 360-pound trucker, originally from Guadalajara, who owned a 13-acre farm a few blocks from the flood zone—steered around a ROAD CLOSED sign without a care. “Damn, I hadn’t seen this,” he said with quiet awe as we gazed upon acres of flooded pistachio trees. All goners.

We crossed a narrow bridge on 16th Avenue, which ran south from the city of Lemoore, and parked at a high spot, just before the pavement dipped into the drink. Tom Fowlks, my partner in crime, was there waiting in his baseball cap and sun shirt. A swollen cow pie swayed in the brown water next to our kayaks. Vincent leaned against the hood of his Jeep and said it was better us than him; no way he was getting in that water. My Tacoma would be safe next to his chicken coop until we returned, whenever that might be.

Though I had no interest in tangling with Johnny Law, I recognized this unusual spring for what it was: a once-in-a-generation opportunity to travel, by way of the federally navigable waters that all Americans have a stake in, 200-plus miles from the heart of these floods, a natural disaster by any measure, to the man-made disaster that is the Delta of San Francisco Bay. Between January and March of 2023, a total of 31 atmospheric rivers dumped nearly 60 feet of snow on Donner Pass and rain everywhere else. The last time that much snow fell in the mountains was 1952—the year I Love Lucy wrapped up its first season on television.

The storms resurrected the lowland connections among the valley’s water-starved rivers, whose flow had long been hijacked by farming barons, now trading their acre-foot allotments like crypto. (The main difference is that water, unlike Bitcoin, doesn’t usually get cheaper.) Some 326 billion gallons of liquid would be cascading down from the Sierra Nevada, undercutting homes, drowning multimillion-dollar almond orchards, and putting towns at risk of becoming fishbowl dioramas. The maximum-security prison in Corcoran, where Charles Manson had been held until his death, was protected by a 188-foot levee authorities feared was still too low to guard it from this normally dry lake, which now rivaled Lake Tahoe in surface area. (Tahoe covers 191 square miles.) Sheriffs in five counties were trying to keep people out of the surging rivers with emergency orders that reeked of nanny-state overreach in a part of California where the politics were more West Texas than West Hollywood.

The author (left) and photographer on the dock at Bethel Island (Photo: Brendan Borrell)

Vincent Ruiz on his property near Tulare Lake (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

The San Joaquin Valley is not a place where outdoorsy people usually find themselves. Roughly 200 miles long and up to 70 miles wide, it’s a huge swath of nut trees and desolation you must cross when heading to the mountains or driving the quickest route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, praying that your radiator doesn’t crap out. But water, like the setting sun, has the power to manufacture beauty. I wanted to see what John Muir had once called “the floweriest piece of world I ever walked,” and to daydream about what it was like when the rivers here ran wild. More than 80 percent of California’s water is consumed by farms, and I hoped to better understand how it might be managed for the benefit of all in a hotter, drier, and all-around more unpredictable era.

Out of a sense of professional duty (or desperation), Tom, a photographer I knew in Los Angeles, had jumped at the chance to join me. “I’m ALL in !!!” he texted when I proposed this trip in April. I had been regularly reviewing satellite maps of the expanding flood zone and identifying potential campsites for a trip that would take between ten days and two weeks, depending on routes and conditions. Unfazed by my disclaimers about heatstroke, backbreaking portages, and drinking water that had the potential to cause irreversible damage to organs and chromosomes, Tom only wanted to discuss the menu. “I’m trying to imagine captaining my kayak,” he said during a scouting mission a couple of days before our departure. “I’ve got the munchies, what am I reaching for?”

And so we shoved off in late May, scraping our rudders over the submerged roadway and paddling west as Vincent waved goodbye. Wind swells were soon clapping against my boat, catapulting that suspect water onto my thighs one cupful at a time. After a couple of miles, my boat seemed to be listing to the right. An inch of water sloshed inside the hull. I shifted in my seat and yanked on the 50-pound drybag strapped to the stern, but no amount of repositioning could counteract the sensation that I was sinking into a biohazard. To the south and east, there was water as far as the eye could see, though an app on my phone indicated that we were passing over land owned by the J. G. Boswell Company.

Between January and March of 2023, a total of 31 atmospheric rivers dumped nearly 60 feet of snow on Donner Pass and rain everywhere else. The last time that much snow fell in the mountains was 1952—the year I Love Lucy wrapped up its first season on television.

A century ago the original Boswell, a cantankerous fellow by most accounts, brought pima cotton from his native Georgia to the San Joaquin Valley. With the help of dams, canals, levees, and pumps, he dried up this lake so that he could sow its black soil with cottonseed. He considered the effort his master stroke, proof of man’s dominance over spiteful weather. Others would frame it as an ecological tragedy: Once the largest body of water in the west, Tulare Lake was, in the wettest years, four times the size of Tahoe. It had steelhead trout gliding through its waters, pelicans nesting on its islands. The surrounding grasslands were home to tule elk and grizzly bears. The Native Yokut people, who once fished and hunted these lands, now run a casino a few miles to the north.

Tulare Lake may no longer exist on most maps today, but its ghost still returns in flood years. Through my pocket binoculars, I spied a brown line of dirt—the levee of the Kings River, one of the main spigots filling Boswell’s land with Sierra snowmelt. “Let’s aim for that,” I told Tom. When we reached the shore, I unscrewed the drain plug on my boat’s tail. Liquid came arcing out like a fountain at the Bellagio. As the flow slowed to a trickle, I raised the nose of the boat to rock it back and forth, and the stream started up again.

I was able to fix the leak a few days later using Aquaseal, but for now there was nothing to do but head north, upriver, draining the swamped vessel whenever we could. We slid our kayaks into the black waters of the Kings, which in its final mile was less a river than an irrigation canal, straight as a row of Boswell’s crops. Not a single tree grew on its banks, just foxtails and stinging nettles.

I waved to a lone farmworker standing on the bare levee with a shovel, squinting at the idiots passing before him. He asked in Spanish if we were fishing, and I told him we hadn’t yet, though Tom had packed his travel pole.

“Here, there are no fish,” he said.

“Well, we’re going a long way,” I replied.

The author taking a break from the pedal-boat grind (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

Before our departure, we sought intel from anyone we could find, including some of the few guys in modern history to attempt something like this before: John Sweetser and Bill Cooper, both residents of Bakersfield. In June 1983, the last time Tulare Lake filled up to this extent, the men, both in their mid-thirties, launched two kayaks in downtown Bakersfield; they made it to San Francisco Bay in 12 days.

Their 350-mile route followed three rivers. First they headed west, riding the Kern for 20 miles before turning north on a man-made flood channel that flowed through marshland and into the southern end of Tulare Lake. After crossing the lake, they paddled upstream on the southernmost branch of the Kings for two days, until they reached the Army and Island Weirs, two dams they portaged before descending the North Fork. They floated the Kings to its confluence with the San Joaquin River, which took them the next 100 miles or so before spitting them out at the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta near Stockton. Finally, they paddled west into the East Bay, taking out at a dock in Richmond.

Sweetser, now 75, lives on the north side of Bakersfield, in a white cottage with peeling paint and a couple of busted cars out front. As we pulled up to the house, we saw an elderly man hunchback his way across the lawn. He looked like he’d just crawled out of a coal-fired furnace; his bare toes jutted out the ends of his Converse All Stars. Tom gasped. “That’s the guy?” he said, as if gazing upon our own future.

Notwithstanding the toll that 40 years as a landscaper had taken on Sweetser’s body, I was relieved that his mind was still intact. The man had been a river rat, and there was little else he cared for in life. In the 1970s, he had become a hero in the whitewater community after fighting to overturn a trespassing conviction related to his use of a fenced-off public easement to put in on the Kern.

In his youth, Sweetser told us, he was mesmerized by stories of previous generations exploring the fickle rivers and wetlands of the valley. Paddleboats had once carried gold miners up the San Joaquin River as far as Herndon, near Fresno, while the Mose Andross, a flat-bottomed schooner, ferried livestock across Tulare Lake. There were five documented trips between Tulare Lake and San Francisco Bay—the last by motorboat during the floods of 1969. “I wished I could have gone, but I didn’t know the people who did it,” Sweetser said. “I was just waiting for the next wet year to do it myself.”

That adventure was still fresh in Sweetser’s mind. He recalled every fork and bend. “We had to paddle 12 hours a day to make any sort of progress,” he said. He and Cooper endured steep headwinds in the Fresno Slough, became disoriented in flooded forests, and dined most nights on cold canned beans. Whenever Cooper wanted to bail, Sweetser pushed him onward.

Sweetser still had the kayaks they’d used on the trip, but he wouldn’t let us into his backyard to see them. He disappeared around the corner as one of his nameless cats attempted to ascertain whether we had any food to offer. After a moment, we heard a loud groan. I inched up the driveway. “John, do you need any help?” I yelled.

“No!” he shouted back. He was embarrassed by all the junk he had amassed back there. A neighbor was out fertilizing her front lawn; I asked if she knew about his past life as a paddling legend. She just shook her head, scowled, and kept feeding the grass. (Even after years of drought, Bakersfield was only just beginning to install residential water meters.)

Sweetser’s groaning continued for several minutes. At last he returned, dragging a dirty green fiberglass kayak with a decal that read: EJECTION SEAT. He had built it himself in the 1970s and was proud of it. We admired his handiwork for a few minutes, and then I inquired about Cooper’s kayak. Sweetser vanished. More groaning. This time I disregarded his orders and helped him retrieve it from the garage so Tom could photograph it. Before we left, Sweetser gave us a stack of research materials he’d accumulated, including a photocopy of a historical map of Tulare Lake.

John Sweetser retrieves one of the kayaks used during his 1983 trip from Bakersfield to the San Francisco Bay. (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

The vibe was very different that evening when we met Cooper at a tidy nature center run by his nonprofit, the Kern River Parkway Foundation. Back in 1983, he was motivated by conservation, not kayaks. These days he enjoys doing work in the name of river health and recreation: his organization has built bike paths, planted trees, and fought, so far unsuccessfully, to wrest back some of the Kern’s flow from farmers to restore its run through downtown Bakersfield. As we watched the Kern race past, he told us we were looking at a mirage. “Next year we may not get four inches, who knows?”

It turned out Cooper didn’t have fond memories of his Ahab-like traveling companion. “Originally, all I wanted to do was get from Bakersfield to Tulare Lake,” he said. The men had gone to the same high school but didn’t really know each other before a mutual friend connected them for the trip. As they were putting in at a beach park downtown, a newspaper reporter, who Sweetser had invited out, asked Cooper how long he thought it would take them to make it to San Francisco. This was the first Cooper heard of their destination.

When he reached the lakeshore, he found a pay phone, called his dad, and asked to be picked up. “You can’t come home now,” his dad said. “It’s on the news.”

Adding to the tension, the whitewater boat Sweetser loaned him was ill-suited for flat sections, where it tracked as well as a hollowed-out pumpkin. In fact, the trip was both Cooper’s first and last time inside a kayak. Sitting in the wet hull day after day, Cooper, a Marine veteran, suffered a relapse of trench foot, which he’d first experienced in Vietnam in the late 1960s. “If I did it again,” he told us. “I would get myself a personal watercraft and line somebody up to give me gasoline.”

Tom and I had scouted their route and concluded that, in the face of the valley’s insatiable thirst, it would be impossible to repeat. And thank God for that. The path north from Bakersfield looked like hell. Although we’d had a similar snowpack this year to the one in ’83, flow from the Kern that might’ve carried us to the lake in the flood channel was now being funneled into groundwater recharge ponds controlled by the nut and fruit giant known as the Wonderful Company.

A south-to-north transit of the lake was also no bueno: the Boswell Company had bulked up its berms and was protecting a belt of dry cropland—mostly tomatoes—in the middle of the lake at the expense of its neighbors to the east. (The state was likely to spend up to $21 million to raise the Corcoran levee by five feet.) We decided we’d have to cut a hundred miles off their trip. We’d put in south of Hanford, on the northern shore of Tulare Lake. From there we’d retrace their route to the Delta.

Neither Tom nor I is a seasoned paddler, and we got crucial help from Dave Shively, an expert at ��ܳٲ��’s parent company, ��ϳԹ�� Inc., who suggested we use pedal boats to “make shorter work of the upwind/upriver miles.” Sit-on-top “pedal-yaks,” which had been pioneered by Hobie, are popular with fishermen, but they also look like something you would rent by the hour in Branson, Missouri. You sit in the equivalent of a lawn chair, pedaling with an undignified back-and-forth motion—imagine a recumbent StairMaster—which drives a set of underwater fins. On most models, knobs on the hull control a rudder. If you run aground, the fins and rudder will flip up to safety. The hulls of these kayaks are so stable you can stand on them, but they’re also so heavy—100 pounds or so, compared with 40 pounds for a typical recreational kayak—that we would need to bring along wheels for the portages.

Photos from the ’83 adventure (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

Bill Cooper on the Kern River (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

Tom and I had our first doozy of a portage around a dam at the northern end of the lake. It was noon. Three trips for our gear and a team effort to wheel each boat across soft ground and up a steep, loose slope to the head gates were enough to make us reconsider our life choices.

When we put in again we were soaked in sweat, but the riverbanks were starting to look—dare I say it?—riparian. The water was still hemmed in by high levees, but it began to bend, a little to the left, then right. As we passed under a highway bridge, swallows exploded from their clay-pot nests. The small, steep-sided islands we passed, covered in low brush and dwarf oaks, would have been a perfect hideout for Joaquin Murieta—the Gold Rush–era bandit who is thought to have been the inspiration for Zorro. I had read that he met his end in a shoot-out near Coalinga, not so far away, but who knows? Little about his life was documented with certainty.

We also glimpsed our first bunches of thick-stemmed tule grass, the lake’s namesake. I told Tom that the Yokut built rafts out of these buoyant reeds, which they used to float down to the lake for spring fishing. What I didn’t tell him was that the Indigenous people were wise enough to discard their rafts after the descent and hoof it back to their villages.

John Sweetser, who’d done the trip in 1983, looked like he’d just crawled out of a coal-fired furnace; his bare toes jutted out the ends of his Converse All Stars. Tom gasped. “That’s the guy?” he said, as if gazing upon our own future.

On the lake, it seemed like we could hum along indefinitely at a pace of three miles per hour and sprint as much as five or six. Subtract three for the current we were fighting and the result was disheartening. With the flood flows, there were few eddies to sneak up. Nor was venturing into sluggish water near the shore an option, since aquatic plants would become tangled in our pedal drives. The cycling GPS I brought refused to acknowledge that we were moving.

“This isn’t even walking speed,” Tom muttered.

“We’re probably going to go one mile per hour up this stretch,” I said. “We’re going to spend ten hours going ten miles.”

“I know it’s many miles,” Tom said. “I’m thinking I don’t want to know how many.”

We talked about Sweetser and Cooper, who reportedly averaged 30 miles per day—inconceivable in our current predicament. We knew that Cooper’s wife had unintentionally met them at one point during their journey, but is that all she did? “Do you think they cheated?” I asked, not really serious.

“Something doesn’t add up,” Tom said, playing along.

By the end of the day, we were spent. We’d made 17 miles in 13 hours. I’d busted one of my wheels during a portage and nearly took a bullet from a yahoo shooting at targets on the bluffs. We passed up three good campsites and then found ourselves in the middle of a swamp at dusk. Pitching tents in head-high weeds, we slurped our meals from inside the safety of bug nets.

Hours later, the temperature dropped into the fifties. The winds picked up, and we realized we probably should have packed sleeping bags. The emergency blanket I’d brought tore into silvery slivers when I tried to unfold it. “It doesn’t reflect well on us,” Tom joked.

“If you’re going for a night or two,” I said, “it’s OK to leave some stuff. But ten days?”

“It’s one of the dumber decisions I’ve been a part of.”

The author wheeling his pedal-driven kayak around a series of dams at the northern end of Tulare Lake (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

The next day, it felt like the river was just messing with us. Maybe there had been a dam release. Whatever the cause, we were pedaling into stronger current and our pace was slower. At one point, I tried to drag my boat while walking on shore, but it kept nosing into the bank, and I kept sinking shin-deep into mud. Six miles in six hours. Time for a lunch break.

We kicked back in the shade of a willow tree. Tom had a three-pound jar of Skippy peanut butter he was trying to conquer, one cold “quesadilla” at a time. I was digging into a bag of pretzels when we saw a Bobcat utility vehicle puttering along on the opposite bank. I waved, thinking they might be friendly locals curious to hear about our exploits.

Within a few minutes, the vehicle had crossed a bridge and was idling behind us. They appeared to be a middle-aged couple, both wearing shorts. “We just wanted to let you know that the farmer who owns this property patrols it by drone, and he’ll call the sheriff if he sees people here,” said the guy, who was driving.

The idea that a drone was a practical way to keep tabs on your almond crop was as outlandish as the idea that these two were trying to be helpful. “We’re planning to stay in the river, below the high-water line,” I said.

The guy said that, in Kings County, property parcels extend across the river. “He actually owns both sides of the river,” he said.

“I don’t think he owns the river itself,” I said, having recently studied basic navigability laws.

“Where did you two come from?” the woman asked.

“The lake,” I said.

“What lake?” she asked, scrunching her brow.

“Tulare Lake.” I thought that might be an icebreaker, but they swiveled their heads like robots and zipped off without another word.

Tom and I may have taken a little too much time to gather our things and start pedaling, because by the time we approached the next bridge, a sheriff’s cruiser was crossing over it. Another was parked on an embankment above the river. A female deputy wearing a dusky green tactical vest ordered us out of our boats. I stumbled to find my footing in the muck and climbed up to meet them. “Nobody’s allowed to be on the water,” the second officer said as he emerged from his vehicle.

My first thought was that this was all Tom’s fault; because he was lagging so far behind, I couldn’t just play dumb and keep pedaling. My second thought was that ��ϳԹ�� wouldn’t reimburse my expenses if I didn’t find a way to finish this trip.

We reluctantly dragged our boats and bags from the water and helped each other get them up to the roadside. As I pulled out my ID, one of the officers eyed our mound of gear while I told them our mission plan. “Sounds pretty cool,” his partner allowed.

“Could you let us get back in?” I asked.

“If we let you go, we would have paperwork for the rest of the afternoon,” he said. He was part of the water rescue unit and was doing this for our safety. There had been drownings, children and adults—at least some of whom were sober. One farmer was trying to recover a rake when he sank into Kings River quicksand and was overwhelmed by the current.

While the officer was back at his vehicle, I peered at my map and saw that the Fresno County line was a ten-minute drive to the north. Tom asked what the rules were next door and the officer shrugged. He said he was letting us off with a warning, which felt like a win, but that didn’t change the fact that we were now stuck at the roadside, in a place where Uber drivers were scarce.

Our only friend in the valley was Vincent, back at Tulare Lake. I’d given him some cash as compensation for leaving my truck behind, but an emergency pickup wasn’t part of the deal. I gave him a call, and 30 minutes later he came rumbling up, grinning and hauling a 16-foot trailer. It was disconcerting to see how fast he covered a distance that took us two grueling days, but I wasn’t sad to skip the last five miles of upriver travel. He’d be dropping us off on the northern fork of the Kings, which meant that we’d have current helping us out.

The team on the San Joaquin River (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

Floodwaters pour out of a dam on the Kings River (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

During our ride to the county line, we saw almond trees everywhere. Vincent talked about how they had taken over since his arrival in the U.S. in the 1990s, as a much poorer and slimmer young man. “Right here you used to plant tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, onions, lettuce, all that kind of stuff,” he said. He used to work those fields.

It was hard to believe that roughly one-third of the irrigation water in California was now being used for nut crops, and that 90 percent of those nuts were shipped overseas. With nuts covering more than a quarter of the farmland, the valley had essentially sold off its food security to Wall Street. That shift has made the valley less adaptable to the wild swings in California’s weather. In times of drought or flood, a farmer might take a hit on his tomato crop for the season, but losing a grove of nut trees—a 25-year investment—can mean bankruptcy.

And while almonds have brought in more cash, the harvest is mechanized, so the wealth stays concentrated. Vincent experienced a degree of upward mobility that’s inconceivable for more recent arrivals. In 2019, seven valley towns made USA Today’s list of the 50 worst places to live in America. Fully half of the population of Mendota, which topped the list, lives below the poverty line; fewer than 3 percent of residents have a college degree.

I hadn’t told Tom yet, but I saw on my phone that Fresno County also had a river-closure order in place, and so did the county after that. We had more than 100 miles to traverse before we’d be free and clear. To my discredit as a leader, I hadn’t taken these closures very seriously. I remained dubious about the legal theory that a county official could simply shut down a navigable river, indefinitely, in the name of an emergency. At our island campsite that night, I got on my phone and discovered that all along, Tom and I, as journalists, had been exempt from the state law the counties were citing.

Going with the flow, we covered 60 miles over the next two days. We crossed the Fresno Slough and made it to the San Joaquin River. We zipped past flooded almond plantations, the trees brown from trunk to tip. In Firebaugh, where we stopped for burritos, a couple of police officers spotted us on the river and chased us down; they let us go after we told them we were reporters. By day four, we had a newfound confidence that nothing could slow us down.

Camping at the Kesterson Unit of the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

We both hit a wall the next day. Or rather a dirt embankment. We were southwest of Merced, standing on an unpaved road in our life jackets. According to every map I pulled up, we should have been looking at the next winding stretch of the San Joaquin. Instead we were squinting at a stagnant, trash-filled pool of water in a ditch choked with vegetation, cut off from the main flow by an earthen dam and the closed gates of a weir. The sprinklers at a nearby farm were going chuk-chuk-chuk with water that should have been flowing in that channel. Our channel.

Baffled by this situation, I plopped down in my boat and called Jeffrey Mount, a geologist, kayaker, and author of a scholarly book called California Rivers and Streams. I had invited him to join us a few weeks earlier, but he claimed he had important professor-emeritus-type stuff to do and gave us good advice instead. He was eager for an update. I told him how we had broken camp that morning and blissfully set out, only to discover that the entire flow seemed to be heading toward an unpromising body of flatwater.

“There’s no way you can go to stay on the river channel?” he asked.

Scanning satellite images at his home, he soon saw what I was talking about. On maps the San Joaquin may look like a typical western river, with a giant dam and reservoir in the mountains, and then smaller dams along its course, but it’s far stranger than that. The water flowing in the lower San Joaquin no longer comes from its historic watershed.

In the first half of the 20th century, aware of all the water being diverted from the upper San Joaquin, farmers on the drier west side of the valley decided that they needed a new supply. At the Mendota Dam, the river is now replenished via a canal connected to the Sacramento River in wetter, cooler Northern California. The imported water then runs along the San Joaquin riverbed for 20 miles or so until it reaches the Sack Dam, where normally most of it is shunted into an irrigation canal. “Every drop of water, even in a moderate year, is managed down to the molecule,” Mount said.

A female deputy wearing a dusky green tactical vest ordered us out of our boats. I stumbled to find my footing in the muck and climbed up. “Nobody’s allowed to be on the water,” a second officer said as he emerged from his vehicle.

During this year’s high water, we had the rare privilege of floating over the Sack Dam, which rode like an easy Class I rapid. We had now arrived at a point where the excess water was moving north, out of the riverbed, through a series of bypass channels. The scummy ditch we had been looking at was a severed section of the riverbed, known to federal regulators as Reach 4B, which has been left to die over the past 60 years. If there’s anything at all in Reach 4B, it’s usually polluted farm runoff coming from sprinklers. These byzantine diversions had made the farmland in this part of the valley what Kevin Starr, a great chronicler of California history, has called “the most productive unnatural environment on Earth.” Also, they had all but eliminated the spring Chinook salmon run on the upper San Joaquin.

Mount said we should follow the path with the most water through a series of channels and sloughs, and that we’d reconnect with the main stem of the San Joaquin farther downstream. Several major dams and bridges lay ahead of us. “Be on your toes,” he warned.

Over the next five meandering miles, the landscape shifted dramatically. Wilted brown grass and the cattle grazing on it gave way to fields of white daisies that would have delighted John Muir.

Soon we came upon a bridge that was too low to float under. Rather than endure another portage, I suggested to Tom that we tie lines to the bow and stern and let the loaded boats float under it. An electric cattle fence hugged the shore up to the base of the bridge, where a bent wire pointed toward the sky. Standing knee-deep in water next to the fence, I paid out the rope to Tom, who was schlepping across the road to the downstream side.

I’m not the most patient man, and Tom sometimes responded to my questions a little more slowly than I liked, which he claimed was a peanut-butter-on-the-roof-of-the-mouth phenomenon. My boat began to pendulum in the current toward some riffles near the bridge piles, catching a little water on its upstream side. I yelled for him to hurry up.

“Duuude,” he said, in a very un-dude-like tone. “You need to slow down.”

I pulled the boat in again, then let it out. After a minute or so, Tom signaled that he had it safely in hand. He told me that he’d got hung up battling waist-deep thistle. I climbed up some metal brackets on the side of the bridge and apologized. “I just got worried,” I said.

He shrugged. I suggested he follow me back to the other side of the bridge, but he waved me off. He was going his own, long, Tom way around.

I was lowering myself from the bridge and about to drop onto the bank when I felt a powerful blow to my chest, like I’d been socked by some supernatural entity. I hung there, frozen, staring at the brown water swirling below, confused and in pain. Then I remembered the electric fence. I dropped to the ground.

Tom had heard me cry out and asked if I was OK. He told me to relax and wait until I was ready, then we’d send the second boat under the bridge. We had miles to go, and
I was in no hurry to get there.

Firebaugh police stop the guys for a fateful chat. (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

Exploring a flooded RV south of Modesto (Photo: Brendan Borrell)

We rejoined the main stem of the San Joaquin late that afternoon. It was flowing with such volume that we could no longer discern the boundaries of the river channel. For the next two hours, my chest ached and I felt a repeated urge to burp. Later I learned that this sensation probably arose from stimulation of the vagus nerve by the shock.

Over the next 50 miles, we heard vehicles but didn’t see anybody. Each lazy bend bled into the next, making the river, which was barely ankle-deep in spots last year, a couple of miles wide. Our best chance at staying in the deeper, faster-moving current was to follow the path of the cottonwoods that marked the river’s normal course. We had to pedal constantly to maintain our bearing, or else the swirling floodwaters would send us into the dead zones on neighboring farmland. We only knew that we’d lost our way when we encountered a barbed-wire fence, an irrigation line, or a half-submerged tractor.

It was exhausting in the way that a long drive is. Knees hurt, backs ached, bladders ballooned. Because the shore was largely inaccessible, rest stops were achieved by hanging on to tree branches.

Late in the day, it was my custom to adjust my seat to a full recline, listen to my audiobook—Mark Arax’s majestic history of the valley, The Dreamt Land—and test how long I could safely close my eyes. I found relief from the boredom by counting refrigerators in the floodwaters, while Tom liked to evaluate his freeze-dried meal options for the evening.

“I think I have stroganoff and another one that basically is stroganoff, it just doesn’t call itself that,” he announced one day. He was still recovering from a packet of al pastor with a false lime note, but he said that he had not soured on Mexican food as a whole. In fact, he was leaning toward something called Mexican beef bowl. “I’m going to cut up a bunch of jerky and chuck it in there, and probably some peanuts,” he said. “Kind of bringing it into the mole zone.”

We were a long way from our destination. “We could go into the pain cave and come out of it, and you’ll be in a completely different state of mind,” I said, adding that he might want the comfort of beef marinara at that point.

“I don’t think I would add the jerky to that,” he said.

A herd of cattle near Merced (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

The scenery kept improving. As we put eyes on what I think was refrigerator ten, we crossed the boundary into a part of the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge known as the Kesterson Unit. A doe and two fawns cowered on an island and watched us float by. A romp of otters, sunning on the shore, slinked into the water one after another. A very peeved beaver, heard but not seen, slapped its tail on the surface. Up in the treetops, noisy egrets and cormorants nested together in dense rookeries, their scraggly fledglings all beak and feather.

We had entered the site of one of California’s largely forgotten environmental disasters. In 1952, after farmers had started tapping the Sacramento River, they became even greedier, expanding onto land on the destitute western side of the valley, which was never fit for agriculture. The water table there rose under irrigation. Mineral salts, forced up into the topsoil, accumulated as the water evaporated. The ground was becoming too salty for crops—a phenomenon that dryland farmers have known about since the dawn of agriculture in Mesopotamia.

To address the situation, farmers demanded a drainage canal, which in 1975 began transporting the mineral broth into a series of man-made ponds known as the Kesterson Reservoir. In the early 1980s, biologist Felix Smith and his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered that there were birds hatching there with deformities. Selenium levels in the brine were ten times what was known to cause abnormalities in chickens. Most of the afflicted birds didn’t live long.

The biologists drafted a press release and sent it up the chain of command, but it never saw the light of day. Smith went to the media and blew the whistle, leading to newspaper stories, a segment on 60 Minutes, and a congressional subcommittee hearing. In the end, the drain was shut down. Some remediation took place, and the beauty that Tom and I were now witnessing was an indication of the resiliency of nature, even in a landscape that had taken as much abuse as the San Joaquin Valley.

We would see further evidence of the river’s healing potential a couple of days later, at the confluence with the Tuolumne River, which flows down from Yosemite. This was our seventh morning on the water, and the day’s big event was connecting with Austin Stevenot, the San Joaquin Valley field manager for the nonprofit River Partners, who met us in a motorboat. I tied my kayak to a tree trunk and climbed up the federal levee on the west side of the river, where Stevenot waited, clad in a pair of camouflage waders and a Bass Pro Shops life jacket.

He gestured toward perfectly spaced rows of young saplings in the floodwater. This wasn’t another thirsty almond plantation, but a restoration plot with thriving young willows, cottonwoods, and box elders. “Over the past hundred years,” he said, “we’ve lost over 95 percent of our riparian forests.” River Partners bought this marginal land from farmers who’d had enough of the destructive cycle of drought and flood. “It’s helping them get out of a bad situation, and it’s helping nature by putting stuff back the best way we can.”

Stevenot took us up the Tuolumne to the Dos Rios Ranch, the largest floodplain-restoration project in California. More than 1,600 acres had been revived here. Along the way, the group built nest boxes for wood ducks, made elevated “bunny mounds”—so that endangered riparian brush rabbits have a place to shelter during floods—and created a three-acre garden to protect native sedge and deer grass used by basket makers from the Northern Sierra Miwok tribe. Stevenot was a member and had helped his grandmother gather the materials.

Dos Rios was slated to be transferred to the state and opened to the public as California’s newest park. It was a small step but an important one. California conservation efforts have been largely coastal, where two-thirds of the population lives, or in the mountains, where the land is too steep to plow and the soil too poor for crops. The valley was left behind. It may not be an easy place to find beauty, but it awaits those who seek it.

Flowery paradise on the San Joaquin River (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

The peak of Mount Diablo, rose colored in the afternoon light, pointed the way toward San Francisco Bay. The river was picking up speed with every mile, and the wind blew from the north, carrying the scent of the sea. Ten miles from Stockton, we camped under a full moon and heard a crash: the opposite bank calved into the water, taking with it what sounded like an entire tree.

We set off before dawn the next day and felt a sense of loss as we rounded a corner and saw the first line of two-story homes crammed together on the levee. The river dumped us into the Stockton Ship Channel, where we had to stick close to shore to avoid the wakes of speeding pleasure boats and freighters that ply these waters.

It was my first time in the Delta, a maze of more than 55 islands and channels covering more than 1,000 square miles, where the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers intertwine and spill their freshwater into the salty bay. To the people who live around here, it’s a sportfishing mecca where you can catch four species of bass. To the farmers in the south, it’s where all their troubles begin. Billboards up and down Interstate 5 claim that more than three-quarters of California’s water is allowed to flow to the ocean unimpeded and, in their view, go to waste. A man-made drought, they call it.

A romp of otters, sunning on the shore, slinked into the water one after another. A very peeved beaver, heard but not seen, slapped its tail on the surface. Up in the treetops, noisy egrets and cormorants nested together in dense rookeries, their scraggly fledglings all beak and feather.

Certainly, there’s a man-made disaster here, but not in the way the billboards claim. The problem is that getting Sacramento River water to thirsty nut trees requires pumping it out of the Delta. The farmers’ water supply gets cut off periodically to prevent endangered Chinook salmon—and a finger-long critter known as the Delta smelt—from getting sucked into the pumps. If the pumps ran full-time during drought and the brackish estuary were allowed to get any drier and saltier, it would put the entire ecosystem at risk, harming the Delta’s recreational opportunities along with water supplies for a half-million residents. Rather than fighting to keep the pumps running, the nut growers, backed by governor Gavin Newsom and some Southern California cities, would like taxpayers to shell out $16 billion for a 45-mile tunnel that would allow Sacramento River water to circumvent the Delta entirely and go to farmers and municipalities in the south—a project opposed by all five Delta counties. “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting,” goes the apocryphal quote often attributed to Mark Twain.

The tunnel project isn’t going to solve the bigger issue looming. Over the next two decades, water supplies could decrease by as much as 20 percent, because of climate change and tighter restrictions on groundwater pumping. It’s a zero-sum game, and the only long-term solution, Jeffrey Mount told me, was for the valley to tear out some of its nut crops. According to a study done by the Public Policy Institute of California, the San Francisco–based think tank where Mount works, up to 900,000 acres of farmland need to be abandoned. The floods are already making farmers rethink where they’ve been planting their trees.

The closed gates of a dam cut off a section of the San Joaquin River known as Reach 4B. (Photo: Tom Fowlks)

Our original plan had been to paddle to the city of Antioch, where the Delta opens up into the Big Break, the easternmost finger of San Francisco Bay. We camped at a marina and planned to set out early on our final day, in order to surf the outgoing tide to Antioch. But when we woke up that morning, we saw no sign of that delicious current, just steady chop from an unfavorable wind.

It was here that our sit-on-top kayaks really let us down. Rather than cutting through the procession of two- and three-foot waves we faced on the open water, the bows would rise up and fall again with a slap. With 20-to-30-mile-per-hour winds, progress was as bad as it had been on our first day. We tucked into the slough on the lee side of Bethel Island and made our way toward the open water of the Big Break. Even though we were in a protected channel, I felt like one of us could flip if a wave broadsided us.

We were still six miles from Antioch and passing what was likely our last bailout point, a place to dock and a nearby restaurant where we could hunker down with nachos and Micheladas to wait for our ride. Tom and I pulled over, and I checked the weather to see if there was any chance for calm. We were facing a small-craft advisory for the next two days. “What do you think it’s going to be like out there in the Big Break?” I asked Tom.

“Murder,” he said.

I remembered what Sweetser had said about the rough waters he and Cooper faced on their final day. They had already paddled for 11 days, and there was no way he was giving up at that point. I looked over at Tom and knew what he wanted—and, if I was being perfectly honest, what I wanted as well. Mexican food it would be.

Correspondent Brendan Borrell () has two 55-gallon rain barrels at his home in Los Angeles and plans to install more. He’s the author of , about the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

From November/December 2023

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Lead Photos: Tom Fowlks

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My Wild, Wet, and (Sometimes) Miserable Paddling Trip Through the Heart of California

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