sociated with it would be along the northeast margin of the lagoon, and trends northwest,” Hemphill-Haley said. Same thing at Stone Lagoon. This particular fold-and-thrust belt is a unique structure. “We’re probably one of the only places where this fold-and-thrust belt is on land,” he said. “Usually it’s off shore.” What’s happening is the Pacific plate, south of us, is shoving northwestward against the North American plate (at the San Andreas Fault), pushing the southern end of the Cascadia subduction zone landward. It comes closest to shore near Humboldt. The spits closing off the lagoons are formed by ocean-borne sediments. As Humboldt State Professor Jeff Borgeld, a marine geologist who studies near-shore sediments, explains it, sediments flow out of the rivers and creeks, get transported by longshore currents and deposited by waves in a zig-zag fashion up and down the coast. The Eel River, Borgeld said, supplies 90 percent of the sediment shoring up the beaches and spits between False Cape and Moonstone Beach, with some more added by the Mad River. The Klamath River and Redwood Creek supply most of the sediment building the beaches and lagoon spits north of Big Lagoon.
Most of the time,
the lagoon is quiet. Wild quiet, that is. Sure, there’s Highway 101 over there, on the east shore. A small visitor’s center nearby (closed now), a boat launch and a cabin where a state park ranger sometimes lives. There’s also the little boat-in campground on the west shore, six spots nestled in a leafy bower of alder, willows and spruce. It, too, is closed these days — the state’s broke. But when it was open, you could row over with a batch of friends and, as the sun sank and the mist took over, it felt like you’d been flung into a remote past. The difficult access filtered out the bozos who’d bring stereos. And though you could still hear trucks on the highway, a mile away, their moaning on the down-
grades just sounded like ghostly harbingers of a distant future. There’ll be no other boats on the water, usually. At least, not when Ken Bechtol comes out here. Even on a weekend. Bechtol’s been coming to Stone Lagoon, on average, once a week for the past 10 years — twice a week most months, less often in the winter. He’ll bring a sailboat, sometimes, but more often one of the rowboats he built. Maybe the little white dory skiff, or perhaps one of the Whitehalls — elegant, 12- to 14-foot numbers patterned after the livery boats that used to ply back and forth between ships, delivering people and goods, in the 19th century’s New York Harbor. Usually he’ll row from the launch to the south end of the mile-and-a-half long spit. If it has breached, he’ll swing far to the side before landing. Then he’ll walk over and watch the lagoon communicating with the ocean. Then maybe he’ll row to the middle of the lagoon and stop. He doesn’t fish. Just watches. Listens. There will be muddles of bobbing black coots. Sleek, curved cormorants. Kingfishers, treelimb-perched then suddenly diving. Ospreys scooping up fish — each orienting the catch lengthwise in clutches so that bird and fish, aligned, cut neatly through the air. The fog might roll in low, opaque. But the lagoon is narrow, cozy within steep forested hills, and Bechtol is never lost. In the winter, the whole hillside to the east will bristle gray where thickets of deciduous trees stand leafless. In the spring it’ll turn brilliant green and stay green all summer. The otters show up for a couple of months, some years. There are two families; one, a family of four, hangs around a little rock on the west shore, near the campground. They’re elusive; one might poke a sleek head out of the water to eye you from 50 yards away, then slither back under water. Sometimes harbor seals swim in, when continued on next page
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