OUR HAPPY AND EFFECTIVE CLEAN-UP DAY Cleaning up Marsh Creek
	NOVEMBER 2005

by Don Huntington
Photos by Russell Byrne

On September 17 nearly 300 enthusiastic volunteers joined forces for the difficult but rewarding task of cleaning up the Brentwood area of Marsh Creek. Last year during this event I remained behind to interview participants, but this year my wife, Rae, our son, Adam, and I — at the urging of our friends, Jim & Kris Hedland — grabbed a few of the regulation black garbage bags and headed for the Northern Wilds of Brentwood, which translated to the section of Marsh Creek where it crosses Sunset.

The weather that day cooperated completely. It was satisfying to transform the appearance of the area by picking up the trash. It was a wearying job, however, trying to navigate the side of the creek right-of-way, with my two feet at uneven levels and my shoes getting full of thistles from the surrounding vegetation. By the end of the job my back was sore, sweat was running off my nose, but my bag was full.

We’re always astonished by the variety of the junk that we pick up. There really is no telling what a trash collector might come across. One resident rode a bicycle past my wife and after expressing his appreciation for our efforts, he told her that he had pulled a discarded wheelchair out of the creek bed the week before.

I probably speak for every volunteer when I say that cleaning up trash in Marsh Creek arouses ambivalent feelings in our hearts. We are obviously irritated by the thoughtlessness of people who consider Marsh Creek to be their personal dumping ground.

I have a tough time trying to picture how the reasoning processes of such people must go. They buy a new tire for their car, for example, and then consider what to do with the old tire. “Why don’t I just throw it in the creek?” they ask themselves. And then, not coming up with any answer, they just stop by the creek bed and throw the thing into the water.

Most of us are baffled by why these people can’t come up with any answer to the question, “Why don’t I just throw my old tire in the Creek?” How can they imagine that lovely Marsh Creek exists to serve as a dump for the rubbish that they are either too lazy or too stupid to discard in an appropriate manner? I imagine such people are the outcome of poor parenting practices. “A body that don’t get started right just ain’t got no show,” as Huckleberry Finn so wisely put it.

But even though we all get irritated by the fact that the junk is there in our creek in the first place, performing community service really does feel good — especially when the results are so visible and dramatic.

One of the great things about the Marsh Creek Clean-up is the feeling that all participants share of being involved in doing something good as part of an organization of people working together for the improvement of the community.

The Marsh Creek Clean-up really was a community-wide event. Sponsors included the City of Brentwood Parks and Recreation Department, The California Coastal Commission, The Contra Costa Resource Conservation District, Home Depot, Safeway Food & Drug, and 110 Degrees Magazine.

A number of local businesses donated money and supplies towards the effort, including:

• The Brentwood Arts Commission
• Safeway
• Home Depot
• Target
• Delta Pure Water

Members of the Leos Club of Bristow Middle School conducted some research to find out what organizations were represented. These included:

• 110° Magazine
• Boys Scout Troop 90
• Brentwood Arts Commission, Rotary Club, and Youth Commission
• Bristow Leadership
• Bristow Leos 04
• Cub Scout Packs 90 and 93
• Home Depot
• Liberty High Science Class, Leadership Group, and the “Liberty for Earth” Club
• Lions Club
• Soroptimist Club

The Leos also asked volunteers to report the items that they removed from the creek. The reported list included the usual suspects, like aluminum cans, plastic containers, glass bottles, cigarette butts, plastic bags, food wrappers, cups, and assorted pieces of paper. Some of the more unusual items included:

• 7 bikes
• 7 grocery carts
• 2 strollers
• 2 mattresses
• 1 set of box springs
• One desk
• A tractor seat
• An oil drum and a barrel
• A water heater
• Roof shingles
• A block of wax
• Various car parts, including several tires, an engine block, and a car alarm
• Numerous pipes
• A container of nitrous oxide
• A pipe for smoking drugs
• Many types of balls and other toys including a scooter
• Shoes and other articles of clothing

According to Ken DeSilva, the Manager of Brentwood Parks & Rec, the volunteers removed five tons of trash from the creek bed.

Learning and Information Activities
We need to work to deliberately put our children in the way of learning about protecting our environment. I remember when my children were young walking with them through an outdoor area. I saw my son pick up some litter from the ground, examine it briefly, and then throw it back down.

“Pick that thing back up and put it in a trash container,” I told him.

“But daddy,” he whined at me, “It would still be on the ground if I hadn’t picked it up in the first place.”

“Nevertheless,” I told him, “once you pick up litter then you’ve taken possession of it and it is up to you to take care of it.” I’m confident that my son hasn’t littered since that day.

I was just doing my duty as a parent because responsible attitudes are mind-sets that we need to inculcate in the thinking of the next generation. So the other part of the Marsh Creek Clean-up activities included a number of opportunities for young citizens to learn about environmental issues in general, and about the state of Marsh Creek in particular.

Just picking up trash along the Creek bed no doubt provides a powerful learning experience. It is safe to say that nobody who ever threw an old tire or water heater into Marsh Creek had ever themselves participated in a clean-up project of any kind. To put it another way, none of the children or adults who spent hours picking up trash from the creek will ever knowingly discard trash in a natural area.

Some deliberate learning experiences at the clean-up that morning reinforced the informal lessons taught by the act of picking up trash. After the pick-up part was over, participants returned to the Creekside Park headquarters to enjoy the picnic lunch that Safeway had provided, but especially to participate in an environmental faire.

The Contra Costa Resource Conservation District organized a variety of activities to disseminate environmental information about water quality and local flora and fauna. The Brentwood Arts Commission provided live music for the event and organized some artistic ways to celebrate nature. They sponsored art activities with native plants and “found objects” from the clean-up. The Parks and Recreation Department led additional arts activities including fish prints and face painting.

Following are some other specific learning activities:

General Watershed Information:

The Friends of Marsh Creek Watershed (FOMCW)
The FOMCW organization provided an overview of the watershed and ongoing activities to help protect it. Volunteers supplied a table with information about the welfare and protection of Marsh Creek and its surrounding watershed.

The FOMCW is a good resource for residents who want to carry on further activities in defense of Marsh Creek. FOMCW is an informal group of local East County residents who meet monthly to study the creek, the watershed, and issues that affect it. Activities include hikes and bike rides that are open to everyone in the community. They also intervene on behalf of the creek by doing such things as attending city commission meetings to encourage the restoration of natural, shaded areas along the Marsh Creek Trail. They participate in scientific activities like GPS mapping of creek features and sampling of insect life in the creek to assess water quality in the creek.

The group is closely following efforts to install a fish ladder around a barrier in Marsh Creek so that salmon can swim further upstream to spawn. This fish ladder is in the planning stages with state and local agencies, working with the non-profit Natural Heritage Institute.

FOMCW is also working on a project to revegetate a small creekside plot with native plants in order to create better habitats for native birds and insects. Learn more about their activities at www.ccrcd.org/marsh.html.

The foundation of any ecosystem is the plant community that provides food and shelter for the insect and animal life of the watershed. The FOMCW helped kids learn how to propagate native plants from cuttings.

Plants like blue elderberry and the native California wild rose are adapted to our climate and soil so they need little water and no fertilizer. They also provide natural habitat for native insects and animals, and support a wider variety of wildlife than plants imported from other countries. The cuttings planted by kids at the clean-up are from plants being grown by members of FOMCW group. They will eventually be planted in a native plant restoration and demonstration garden at the north end of Creekside Park.

Simulating Marsh Creek and Delta Water Quality Problems
Jeff Cowling, a Municipal Representative to the Contra Costa Clean Water Program and Elizabeth Harshaw, a volunteer with the RCD (Contra Costa Resource Conservation District) used a scale model of a watershed to demonstrate how pollution gets into the water from various sources.

Children had fun spritzing pretend rainstorms onto the model landscape and watching simulated pollution travel into the bay. The model demonstrates how storm drains near our homes carry dirt, oil, and garden chemicals from sprinkler runoff into the creek and from there into the bay and eventually into the ocean. They learned that even chlorinated water drained from pools and spas into storm drains can damage the fragile life living in the creek.

Testing Water Quality
Tom Lindemuth, a Freedom chemistry teacher, brought a team of students to the clean-up and demonstrated a test of the Marsh Creek water quality that produced several essential measures of the creek’s health.

Tom has involved about 200 students over five years in water quality testing in Marsh Creek. At the park, people could watch while students conducted chemical tests of the water, and examine creek bugs that live on the bottom of the stream.

Since some insects can tolerate polluted water, while others can’t, researchers can infer some things about the creek’s health just by analyzing the mix of insects inhabiting its waters. The results showed that the water at Creekside Park was relatively pure that day.

Clean Boating
Local residents who enjoy boating in the Delta had a chance to learn some environmentally sound boating practices at a table sponsored by the Contra Costa County’s Clean Boating Program. Their motto is “Keep the Delta Clean. You Play in it. You Drink it Too!”

The program is sponsored by five Delta marinas: Sugar Barge, Lauritzen Yacht Harbor, Discovery Bay Yacht Harbor, Lazy M Marina, and Bethel Harbor.

The staff demonstrated cool stuff for boaters like an oil-absorbing bilge pillow, and a great delta map showing locations of 43 certified used-oil collection centers. They were also distributing information about sewage pump out locations, hazardous waste drop-off collection centers, pet-waste collection points, and refuse/recycling containers.

We share our East Contra Costa environment with a wide variety of other creatures, most of which we never see. Although they rarely bother us, sometimes our actions (like littering or polluting the water) can bother them! Three groups had exhibits or activities about local wildlife.

Identifying Threatened Animals
The Liberty High School Earth Club created a guessing game for children that taught information about Marsh Creek denizens, such as muskrats, herons, and turtles. They also displayed pictures of animals that the state or federal government consider threatened or endangered, but which can still be found in parts of Marsh Creek Watershed.

Local animals that are at risk for extinction include the San Joaquin kit fox, the burrowing owl, the western pond turtle, the California tiger salamander, and the red-legged frog (of Mark Twain’s celebrated jumping frog story). Children learn that these animals are threatened by loss of habitat and pressure from competing introduced (“exotic”) species.

Helping Helpful Species
At another exhibit, children learned from representatives of the Delta Science Center how bats help control the insect population, especially mosquitoes, and how native birds play a valuable role both in insect control and seed dispersal. Home Depot employees helped kids build bat houses to encourage these useful animals. The Lindsay Wildlife Museum brought a live garter snake, a woodpecker, and stuffed specimens of several other animals that live in Marsh Creek watershed.

A Towering Pile of Trash
The highlight of the event was when Barry Margesson and Annette Day put all the bags of trash, together with the various articles that had been pulled out of the creek, into an impressive Tower of Trash. The nasty pile was an encouraging sight and a joy to all the onlookers, who were delighted that this awful collection, which had been on the banks of our little stream when the sun came up that morning, was going to be in a land-fill before the sun went down that evening.

Thanks to everyone who pitched in to assist in this clean-up project. It would be wonderful if the creek could only stay clean now. But we all know that somewhere some guy is looking at an old TV set, car battery, can-opener (who knows what?) and thinking, “This old thing is never going to work again. Why don’t I just throw it in the creek?”

And because of ignorance, stupidity, the lack of parental guidance, or some other appalling deficiency, he just can’t think of any answer to his dim-witted question.

So whatever that thing is, we’ll have to fish it out next year.

See you then!