Levee Roadways Offer Unexpected Sights : In Delta, Boats Have the Right of Way

All traffic stops on Highway 12 approaching Rio Vista as the bridge over Potato Slough opens for a pleasure craft whose rigging cannot clear the bridge.

Five minutes later, the boat is well settled into its berth at the Tower Park Marina as the bridge again becomes a conventional thoroughfare. Then, in a flash, the waiting vehicles scurry on their way.

The scene is typical of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a merger of land with 1,000 miles of rivers, canals and sloughs, and at least 125 resorts and boat harbors. Here waterborne craft seem more numerous than vehicles on the roads, and boats have the right-of-way.

On the map, the Delta looks like a lot of blue scribbles over parts of five counties: Sacramento, Yolo, Solano, San Joaquin and Contra Costa. The map doesn’t indicate how levees channel the network of waterways to the area’s farmlands.

Levees Built by Chinese

Occasionally, there’s too much water. The Delta’s aging levees, built by pioneer Chinese laborers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after they finished work on the transcontinental railroad, don’t always hold. That’s what caused floods during the severe rainstorms last February.

After the land was originally reclaimed from swampland, creating nearly five dozen man-made islands, farmers planted asparagus in the rich peat soil. But in 1940, a disease wiped out the asparagus. Gradually, the area blossomed with pear orchards.

Behind the orchards, other crops that spread out to the horizon include field corn, safflower, sugar beets, processing tomatoes and, later in the year, sweet corn.

Roads Lie Atop Levees

Long stretches of Delta roads sit atop levees, so the motorist setting out for a leisurely day on the Delta must be prepared for two-lane roads with few spots wide enough to pull over and watch the passing river scene.

On a sweltering summer day in the valley, breezes sweep the Delta, leaving it 10 to 20 degrees cooler, making a picnic or leisurely visit to a Delta restaurant an especially pleasant outing.

And some of the most rewarding features are not on the main highways. For example, if you start south from Sacramento on Highway 160 and follow it all the way to Rio Vista, you’ll miss Locke altogether as the main highway zigs and zags across the Sacramento River.

But staying on the east side of the river, first you’ll find Bates School grounds in Courtland, where the annual Pear Fair attracts 40,000 people the last Sunday of each July.

Early Chinese Town

Keeping to the east side of the river on Isleton Road, Locke is six miles farther. Locke is an almost perfectly preserved huddle of shacks left over from the teens of the century, when 2,000 Chinese lived there. Today, just 24 are left.

In Locke, Al’s Place and the Dai Loy Museum are worth visiting. Al’s has so many signs and mementos hanging behind the bar, you don’t know where to look. So look up. The ceiling is covered with hundreds of crumpled $1 bills, affixed by the local sport: First you impale the bill with a thumbtack, then wrap it around a silver dollar, then throw hard.

A couple of doors down the street, the Sacramento River Delta Historical Society looks after the Dai Loy Museum which it restored eight years ago. A Chinese gambling den of the ‘20s, it’s open from noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Admission is free, but a donation is welcomed by the volunteers who maintain the place. Last year, 10,600 people from 43 states and 23 foreign countries signed the guest book.

Old River Port

South of Locke is Walnut Grove, recognizable from the tall TV transmission towers. From here, a bridge crosses the river to the main Delta highway.

Two miles south of the bridge is Ryde--once a thriving river port when produce was shipped rather than trucked out of the valley. All that’s left today, however, is the freshly painted, blush-pink, 1920s Ryde Hotel.

Inside you’ll find crisp linen and fresh flowers on tables in an Art Deco dining room-bar. Co-owner Robb Greer mixes strawberry daiquiris and ramos fizzes while talking with customers.

About five miles downstream, a bridge takes traffic back across the Sacramento River to Isleton. Leaving Highway 160, you can continue south from Isleton on Jackson Slough Road which cuts through the fields, intersects Highway 12, and ends with a left turn onto Brannan Island Road, where there’s a string of marinas lined up one after another.

Dine on Riverboat

Among the best-known for meals as well as dockage are Spindrift Marina and Moore’s Riverboat, both serving food and beverages and a whole lot of mariner chitchat.

Moore’s actually is an old riverboat, the Sutter, one of 100 or so that plied the Delta earlier this century. John and Elvera Moore bought the boat in 1961 and converted it into a restaurant. The Moores’ daughter and son-in-law now run it.

Moore’s calls its atmosphere “carefree.” How else do you describe a place bedecked with a mix of women’s panties and nautical signal flags?

To round out a day on the Delta, you might wind up in Rio Vista, on the River’s west bank. From a Solano County park called Sandy Beach you can watch a swarm of wind surfers perform daredevil tricks.