One NATIVE TIDES   Before the people there was only water. -MIWOK CREATION TALE     The Miwoks had it right. Before California there was the miles-deep ocean. The geological assembling of California would take uncounted millennia of tectonic plates surfing the liquid magma of the planet's heart and riding up on one another. These collisions, marked by tens of thousands of massive earthquakes, moved rocks and minerals around the planetary orb like sand grains in a breaking wave. Of course the very concept of plate tectonics, the idea that coastal California, with its diversity of steep mountains, terraced marine bluffs, and wide, flat, sandy beaches, is a product of millions of years of collision and grinding between the North American and Pacific plates, was considered scientific heresy until relatively recent times. In the 1950s and '60s, work on Atlantic seafloor spreading, and the mapping of midoceanic ridges and magnetic fields by Walter Pittman, Bruce Heezen, cartographer Marie Tharp, and others, confirmed the theory of plate tectonics or continental drift. This theory made sense and also explained what most curious schoolchildren had already figured out: That Africa, South America, and the other continents seemed to fit together like so many jigsaw pieces because they did.

Over millions of years, they'd all drifted apart from a single supercontinent, Pangaea. The Atlantic's volcanic ridges and ranges and the Pacific's still highly active volcanic ring of fire, along with earthquakes, climate and temperature variations, ice ages and carbon-linked warmings, have also had huge impacts on the rise and fall of sea levels in different ocean basins, particularly in recent millennia. Some twelve thousand years ago during the early Holocene, a Paleo-Indian hunting party might have set off through a grassy river valley passing between a pair of high bluffs topped by live oak, Pacific madrone, and bay laurel. Those bluffs marked an opening between the wide valley and an otherwise contiguous range of low green mountains adorned with majestic pines and three hundred-foot-tall arrow-straight redwood trees. They'd hike another twenty-seven miles across golden meadows of rye grass, and white, yellow, and pink trillium, tree tobacco and fireweed, and through pine, sycamore, and cypress groves past grazing herds of mule deer and big elk too skittish to approach and then, near a coastal swale, give wide berth to a wary grizzly and her two young cubs feeding on the carcass of a dead fur seal. Overhead in cerulean blue skies California condors with ten-foot wingspans circled, waiting for their chance to feed. Soon the hunting party reached a rocky headland with several craggy granite peaks where thousands of cormorants, puffins, and gulls roosted, whitening the rocky pinnacles with their guano. A few miles beyond, on a wide beach, they cautiously snuck up on a mob of Steller sea lions and elephant seals much larger than themselves.

Then, in a quick rush of adrenaline and bravado, they targeted a single large animal, administering a lethal clubbing to the beast, marine mammals being one of their key sources of protein. Next, using sharp stones and obsidian blades they would have begun the slow process of butchering their kill. During this last major ice age, with the sea level more than three hundred feet lower than it is today, it was possible for hunters to travel by foot through what is now not a river valley but the waters of San Francisco Bay and on through the naturally formed Golden Gate bluffs across what is today open Pacific waters to California's own Galapagos, the craggy Farallon Islands twenty-seven miles off San Francisco. These islands are famous not only for their still abundant bird life but also for the visiting white sharks that cross a nearby marine abyss to feed on young elephant seals and other marine mammals that continue to congregate there. Farther south, the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara were at the time one large near-shore island called Santarosae, which was settled by California's earliest native people using tule canoes constructed of bundled tule reeds common along the marshy coast. Even farther south, the grass and brush-covered islands of Cortes off San Diego would later sink beneath the waves to become the Cortes Bank submarine mountaintops. Archaeological digs on what are now the Channel Islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel have found ancient Indian artifacts and food middens that indicate they feasted well off marine mammals, waterfowl, urchins, mussels, and abalone, later using the abalone's mollusk shell for fishhooks that made shiny lures. The ability to fish expanded their diet to include finfish, lobster, shark, and moray eel.

At night and during foggy days they could warm themselves with mesquite, cypress, and pine fires and wrap themselves for comfort in thick otter fur robes. The Chumash tribe's origin tale may reflect an original settlement on the island of Santarosae that became less tenable as the sea channel to the mainland expanded with glacial meltwater toward the end of the ice age. With sea levels rising at more than a meter a century, foraging trips to the mainland would have become more difficult over time. In the Chumash story the island population became too crowded and so the creator gave the people a rainbow bridge to cross to the mainland but warned them not to look down. Those who did fell from the rainbow into the ocean, but taking pity on the drowning people, the creator turned them into dolphins. Anytime I sail through the Santa Barbara Channel or head out to Catalina from Long Beach, spotting hundreds of white-sided and common dolphins leaping in great schools through the sea, I can't help wondering who they are. It was the late glaciated ice age some fifteen thousand years ago that brought the first small bands of humans to California's shores from Siberia across the Bering land bridge and adjacent rocky ice fields but also, according to newer research, along the Aleutian Islands and West Coast in skin boats and other small watercraft. They initially settled in the warmer south until, over several thousand years, from about 10,000 to 6,000 B.

C., temperatures rose, and sea levels with them, creating more coastal estuaries, wetlands, lagoons, and tidal pools in Northern California that proved excellent habitat for hunting and foraging. Bands and clans of people migrated back north from Baja and Malibu to Elkhorn Slough by the Salinas River, to Half Moon, San Francisco, Bodega and Humboldt bays, as well as to the banks of the Carmel, Russian, Noyo, Mattole, Klamath, and Smith rivers just south of Oregon, where people are still somewhat hostile to bands of Californians moving north. By 9,000 B.C. sea level rise had severed the Bering land bridge, separating Russia from Alaska and effectively stranding the native populations of California and the Americas. The Californians might have numbered in the high hundreds by then. By the time European explorers first caught sight of California around A.

D. 1500, the natural wealth of the region had seen the native population expand to some three hundred thousand people living in culturally distinct tribal societies including the Tongva, Chumash, Esselen, Miwok, Pomo, Sinkyone, Yurok, Tolowa, and Shasta. Native peoples' lives and livelihoods depended on California's bountiful shore and coastal range, as well as on the acorn flour, duck-, salmon-, and venison-rich territories that extended inland to the great estuarine wetlands of the delta and central valley. Tribes also settled the region's northern temperate rainforest, southern high desert, and even the foothills of the Sierra with its stark granite mountains' range of light. The biological abundance of the coast, however, allowed for cultural diversity unseen in the interior regions to the east and south. More than sixty languages based on twenty distinct linguistic groupings were spoken in California. Villages and towns of upward of one thousand people appeared in coastal regions rich in salmon, shellfish, acorns, rabbit, deer, and marine mammals, including seals and dolphins that could be trapped on or near the shore. In the northern spruce and redwood forest between what's now Humboldt Bay and the Oregon border, the Tolowa, Yurok, Chilula, Bear River, Wiyot, Mattole and other tribes occupied coastal lagoons, bays, and riverbanks.

Here they built wooden plank houses with round doors and sweat lodges for spiritual purposes and to help take the chill off. They built with redwood and cedar, including dugout canoes made from redwood logs worked with fire, adze, and elk horn wedges till they were as smooth, symmetrical, and polished as any Royal British launch. Some were two-person transports; some were seagoing trade and hunting craft more than forty feet long by eight feet wide that could hold crews of a dozen or more men. While runs of chinook and coho salmon, steelhead trout, smelt, and other fish were abundant almost year-round on the Klamath and other rivers, the big redwood dugouts were essential for launching the big-game sea lion hunts of late summer. Before dawn on the day of a hunt, one of the canoe skippers would go down to the beach and listen to the sound of the waves to determine the size of the groundswell and conditions offshore. If he was satisfied and got the headman's agreement, his crew would then launch through the surf, paddling with all their strength. Once outside the break, they might travel twenty miles or more to the islands, promontories, and rock outcrops where Steller sea lion colonies had their rookeries. There they would drop.