Crazy ideas that seem impossible

An Earth Day story

On a cold March morning, under a penetrating fog, Yurok tribal council members were giving me a tour of O’Rew, at the southern edge of Redwoods State and National Park.

Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

Here, the poetics of this place are hard to ignore. The redwood shaded trails once connected villages with the Klamath and Trinity Rivers, the coast, and each other. The land was then stolen from the indigenous community and became a site of death and destruction and pollution. It became a former redwood logging mill that tribal members had to work at to put food on the table.

I was here to report on the next phase of this land’s life. A nonprofit, Save the Redwoods League, had purchased the land and partnered with other conservation agencies and the Yurok tribe to restore the creek to once again make it a safe harbor for juvenile salmon.

A year from completion, we stood on the banks of the newly rerouted Prairie Creek celebrating the sprouting redwoods, the green frogs leaping into the bog, and the return of the baby salmon.

Barry McCovey, a Yurok tribal member and a local ecologist who worked on the restoration, starting with the ripping up of acres of pavement, surveyed a new bend in the creek and said, “Crazy ideas that seem…