My Own Private Wetland

Here’s the thing about moving to a place that didn’t exist before some developers with beaucoup bucks dreamed it up—there’s no there there.  My Elk Grove neighborhood, known as Franklin Reserve, used to be a cow pasture until Reynen-Bardis, Cambridge, Ryland and the like filled the acreage with streets and houses and more houses and more streets.  The only greenery, it seemed, was the neatly newly-sodded lawns, each with a seedling tree poking out of the turf.

There were no parks.  Oh, there would be; they were clearly marked out on the Master Plan, and the assessments to pay for them were being collected from homebuyers from the start.   But it would be years before Cosumnes Community Services District broke ground on the parks—and only now, some six years later, do they exist in fact.  This made walking my dog a rather boring exercise, trudging up and down seemingly empty streets with poor Molly, a Bichon Poodle used to living in a part of Los Angeles where multiple dogs per owner was the norm, trying to find one or two interesting odors she could root out and pee on.

Then one autumn day, I came upon—well, I would call it a creek.  A body of water that meandered along as far as my eye could see.  To my uneducated eye, it looked to be a wetland, filled with all manner of flora and fauna native to such places.   Birds sang, rabbits hopped, frogs croaked.  I could see all this from my vantage point on a path that followed this marshland creeky place. 

I don’t know what the distance from beginning to end would be if you drew a straight line, because there were none.  Instead, someone had created a wandering pathway wide enough for bikes and runners and just plain dog walkers to share.  Bordering this path on one side were the backyards of all the houses that had been newly planted in this former cow pasture.  On the other side, the creek side, there were trees--small ones to be sure, but more than sticks poking out of the ground. 

There were rosemary and other shrubs that, horiculturally-ignorant as I am, I don’t know the name of.  These were more than enough to satisfy Molly’s need to sniff; she was in doggie heaven.  And I loved it too.  There was a tranquility there, a connection to raw nature than made up a little for the fact that I had moved to a wasteland of beige boxes.   In fact, if you focused solely on the marshy-creeky-water, you could forget that you were smack in the middle of a huge housing development.

I keep calling this body of water “the marshy-creeky-water” because I don’t know what its name actually is.  Since I wanted to write about it for this column, I went to an online map to see what it was called.  Not only wasn’t it called anything; it didn’t seem to exist at all. 

I know that mapping of our area did not happen concurrently with the building of it.  We had to give specific instructions to delivery people for the first several years because this part of Elk Grove wasn’t yet on the GPS.  However, this is some six years later and Google, despite their weighty business commanding the world, should have caught up by now.  So I Googled “Elk Grove Creek”—and yes, there it was. I could see it clearly on the map, but I needed to know more.  So I Googled, “Where is a good place to go walking in Elk Grove?” and this is what came up, on the Cosumes Community Services District website:

Laguna Creek Parkway features an off-street trail system to explore the scenic treasures of Elk Grove as it parallels and traverses the flow of the Elk Grove, Laguna and Whitehouse Creeks. The multi-use trail dips into suburban wilderness offering rejuvenating exercise such as biking, walking and horseback riding, and outdoor recreation pursuits including birdwatching, fishing and photography. The trail passes through centuries old wetlands, wildlife habitats, open spaces and neighborhood parks.

Clearly, that was it: the wetlands, the wildlife habitats, the off-street trail system that “parallels...the flow of the Elk Grove, Laguna and Whitehouse Creeks.”  Which one of those is my marshy-creeky-water?  I went to the Interactive map of the Cosumnes Community Service District and—wait a minute! That Laguna Creek Parkway isn’t my marshy-creeky-water at all.  That Parkway is all north of Elk Grove Boulevard, closer to Sheldon and Elk Grove-Florin.  My marshy-creeky-water trail is almost at Franklin, miles southwest of that. 

So I was back to square one: what was this nameless creek and trail that I had found?  It seemed to exist on no map, and I had fantasies that I was living in some parallel universe where the places I visited were only in my mind.  But I haven’t spent a lifetime digging for facts as a journalist for nothing. I would find this place; it had to be on paper somewhere.

It was: Agenda Item No. 8.15 from the City of Elk Grove’s City Council Staff Report of July 14, 2010 resolved that the city “approves the allocation of $2,468,000 in East Franklin Landscape Corridor Fee funding for the Safety, Streetscaping, and Bicycle/Pedestrian Improvements Program” in the fiscal year 2011-15. 

My marshy-creeky-water is actually a drainage ditch, but what a glorious ditch it is.  I don’t know who is responsible for the design of it; clearly it was well thought out and some money was spent on it long before the parks were even started.  As to how they’ll be spending the $2 million-plus—and when—we’ll keep on this story and report back to you. If you’re in the neighborhood—the walkway starts at Whitelock just west of Adkins—come have a look.  Right now it’s winter there, but spring is just around the corner, as they say, and the drainage ditch will soon be in full bloom.