Re: [Paddlewise] Southern California Report

Craig Jungers wrote:

> While at Doheny and waiting for the big SanO Christmas Eve morning
> surfing extravaganza we did the usual touristy things including a visit
> to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano. [snip] I found myself wondering
> why the missions were so often situated miles from the ocean and
> wondered if they would have been placed differently if the padres had
> kayaks instead of burros.

If the natives had had watercraft, I bet the padres would have used them. 
The natives lived a subsistence lifestyle in a climate and time when little 
contact with the ocean was needed, unlike the cultures to the north which 
depended on the sea for their subsistence.

I grew up just south of San Onofre some 50 miles or so, passing through the 
mandatory yearly dose of California history in elementary school, replete 
with the saga of the missions, sans what the natives might have thought of 
it all.  Nowadays, the offspring are getting even with a panoply of 
casinos, reversing the flow of gold and goods.

Now to the real reason the missions were sited inland:  They were placed 
along El Camino Real, which is most places not a coastwise arterial at all, 
because of the huge salt marshes alternating with sandstone-based 
peninsulas, some steep-to, some just rounded lumpy barriers to a coastwise 
walker (who would be a _swimmer_ at the low points).  No way a wagon, 
horse, and burro road could have been maintained closer to the coast.  And, 
the marshes were no doubt an alleged source of bad humours and (perhaps) 
malaria.  Even today, those low areas are a barrier to the sprawl Southern 
California spawned for the rest of us to enjoy.

The peninsulas were extensively used by the natives, for their acorns (made 
into "flour" after much working in a stone metate' followed by leaching of 
the bitter tannins from the acorn flesh), for pinon nuts, and for access to 
the ocean, for fish, pinipeds (rare), and bivalves.  As young snorkelers, 
my buddies found (and retrieved for use as yard ornaments) dozens upon 
dozens of metate's from the rubble alongside the major reef at the north 
end of Solana Beach, just south of Seaside, a reef break well-known to 
surfers.  The metates are a gift of the rapid erosion of the peninsulas, to 
be joined soon (in geologic time, anyway) by the many thousands of 
multi-million-dollar bluffside McMansions, stop-gap seawalls and concrete 
facades blown-onto the sandstone notwithstanding.

-- 
Dave Kruger
Astoria, OR
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