One april morning, after the Aleutian Canada geese had already left Crescent City on their northward journey, I was driving west from Petaluma to look at restoration work on private cattle ranches along Walker Creek. There was to be a small tour of these projects in the Chileno Valley, and I thought we might do a story.

That was the pretext. In fact, I was in the grip of spring fever and escaping the office. This issue of the magazine was almost ready to go to the printer, only this page remained to be written, and the wildflowers were in full bloom.

The quiet two-lane road toward the coast winds through a curvaceous landscape, radiantly green in early sunlight. The hills have retained their smooth roundness, they have not been carved up by development, and my eyes followed their contours the way a lover’s hands might trace the curves of the beloved’s body. I was drunk with spring, and once again thanked whatever fates had arranged that I should live amidst all this beauty.

After passing an old one-room schoolhouse, though, I was ambushed by the spectre that has been hiding in the back of the mind ever since September 11. What if one of those bombs we dropped on Afghanistan were to explode here, one of those bombs that blast through rock and penetrate caves? What if some of the spent-uranium bullets we used in the Gulf War were to scatter their radioactive dust here? What then?

I turned on the radio. On KPFA, a British journalist, speaking from the West Bank, was describing what he found in the Palestinian refugee camp he had managed to reach by eluding Israeli troops: a field of rubble where perhaps a hundred homes had been leveled by bulldozers. There was a terrible stench, he reported, which he recognized from past experience as that of decaying human bodies.

I drove on, no longer seeing the land around me. Now a young woman was being interviewed, one of the brave international observers who had chosen to stay in the battle zone as a human shield. There is no escape, I thought, the world is here. What goes around comes around, as a wise woman once told me. Our planes, our bombs. Ourselves.

I switched off the radio before turning in to the Chileno Valley Ranch, where a small group had gathered for the tour, mostly people involved in the restoration projects, from the Marin County Resource Conservation District, Marin Agricultural Land Trust, Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO), and Prunuske Chatham, Inc., the consultants.

We walked past the barn—I stepped inside and breathed deeply of the sweet fragrance of hay and animals—across a meadow and a new small bridge across the creek, flowing amid dense willows. Restoration was begun on this ranch seven years ago and was now completed. First a fence had been built to keep grazing cattle away from the stream, prevent further bank erosion, and allow riparian plants to grow. Then the denuded banks were planted with a variety of willows and understory plants selected with the advice of PRBO. Big-leaf maples, oaks, blackberries, and wild roses had formed a dense canopy above pools of clear dark water. It was a peaceful place. We could see that steelhead will find it suitable for spawning when they return one day from Tomales Bay. Songbirds have already reestablished themselves.

For the next three hours I forgot the rest of the world. We visited several other ranches along Walker Creek, where restoration projects are in earlier stages, and were glad to see the results of the slow and patient efforts to mend what had been destroyed by carelessness and lack of understanding. To help heal a natural system is more difficult than to destroy it. Instream studies had been conducted, permits had been obtained, banks had been stabilized by willow weavings, rocks had been strategically placed here and there. Children and teachers had helped with the revegetation. Cows had watched quietly from behind the fence, as they now watched us.

When I got back on the road I found it unfamiliar, although I had passed along it just a few hours before. By the time I was at the old schoolhouse, however, the landscape unfolded again for me, restful and lovely.

This issue of the magazine contains stories about mending nature, human beings, and communities. There is much good news here, news that often does not get reported because it is quiet, local, and undramatic. To find and publish this news is one of the pleasures of editing Coast & Ocean.

But the suffering world is all around us, and we are part of it, so it is also inside us, for we are bound together on this planet by air, ocean, and our common humanity.

Many of our fellow citizens, moved to express empathy with victims of terrible violence, have displayed American flags. We here at Coast & Ocean, also feeling a need to respond, are publishing a poem by Hafiz, a Persian Sufi who lived in the 14th century and is known and loved throughout the Mideast today. Arthur Okamura has created a monoprint to go with it. You will find both on the inside back cover.

—Rasa Gustaitis