Nestled by the Freeway, a Veritable Walden

With a drizzle threatening, the light is poor for spotting hummingbirds and black phoebes. But bird-watcher Dan Springer is out here anyway, searching the woods. Binoculars hang at his neck. He climbs the trail through a cluster of pine and cedar and veers into a small clearing.

“Last year we had a pair of great horned owls nest in here,” Springer says, reaching into a fanny pack for “Birds of North America,” a fat volume heavily highlighted and indexed with plastic tabs. He shows off a drawing of the 22-inch owl with a pride that is almost parental.

It is damp and still. The ragged skyline of trees--oaks, sycamores, towering eucalyptuses--blocks the outside world and muffles the drone of commuters rushing to work on the nearby 605 Freeway. On these trails at the El Dorado Park Nature Center, the surrounding city of Long Beach all but disappears.

Springer, a retired electrician, likes that escape, likes the solitude. He discovered this place five years ago, when his wife, Norma, became ill. She took up walking for her health.

Norma died the year before last, but Springer has made the search for birds here his private ritual. Twice a week he finds a deep measure of serenity in this man-made wilderness smack in the middle of the suburbs.

“How’s that nest over there?” a passing hiker calls out, indicating a stick nest high in a 70-foot white alder. “Was that a red-tailed hawk?”

“A red-shouldered hawk,” Springer calls back.

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Three trail loops cut through the 102-acre sanctuary: one a mile long, another two miles and a shorter paved route for the disabled. There are two lakes, running brooks and rolling meadows of tall grasses and wildflowers. It would be a mistake, though, to assume that this is a native habitat somehow carefully preserved.

On the contrary, this is one of the few wilderness refuges ever created from scratch. Dirt from the 605 Freeway construction was used to turn a flat flood plain into rolling terrain. Vegetation came from anywhere and everywhere: Brazilian pepper, Chinese elm and Canary Island pine were planted alongside native trees such as willows, oak and elderberry. Many were being grown to line city streets. The meadows showcase a rich array of wildflowers, sage, wild radish, thistle, nightshade and jimson weed.

When the city of Long Beach opened the refuge 30 years ago today, the landscape was largely barren. It took time for tree canopies to envelop the trails. Animals came in on their own: squirrels, raccoons, foxes, opossums. Every so often a coyote wanders in from the San Gabriel River channel.

The trails begin on the south side of Spring Street, just east of the river. To walk them is to escape into a sort of fantasy land, a journey you begin by crossing a pair of wood bridges over a lake occupied by turtles. The turtles are among the least welcome inhabitants. Released here by Cambodians who believe they bring luck, they foul the water and dominate the ecosystem, says park naturalist Mary Blackburn. Yet they are pleasing to watch, gliding through the shadows with a tranquil slowness that can’t help but evoke calm. Small floating platforms have been placed in the lake so they can sun themselves.

The trails rim the shore and wind into thicker foliage along a narrow brook. Sunlight through the oak and sycamore creates dappled patterns on a mosaic of fallen leaves. In places, one trail is defined by great mounds of fragrant honeysuckle and bougainvillea, and wax-like cactus formations as elaborate as coral reefs.

On weekdays you can stroll for long periods in complete solitude. A bench near the larger south lake allows you to sit and regard the type of scene--sunlight, breeze-rippled water, ducks, trees--that inspires poetry. This is a place that Henry David Thoreau would have loved.

He might have moved in.

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The milieu isn’t perfect: In a couple of places, it is possible to see the skeleton stanchions of high-voltage lines, and there’s that hum of freeway noise. Visitors are advised to imagine it’s a distant waterfall, a sound it mimics surprisingly well.

There are other noises too, mostly birds and lizards darting through the grass and brush--quiet sounds that are hard to experience in the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. Those who find the sanctuary tend to keep coming back. Most people you encounter are regulars.

Ed Morrissey and Doris Thibault, who are engaged to be married, come here every Friday along with a dozen other members of an over-40 walking club. Members walk the trail and have breakfast at the nearby El Dorado Country Club.

A chapter of the Audubon Society marches through once a month. School classes visit on field trips. A group of fifth-graders charts the water clarity and temperature as part of an ongoing science project.

Deep along the trail, on a pitched hillside overgrown with a tree canopy, retired teacher Dan Rosenberg is exactly where he wants to be: “No sirens, no fire engines,” he says, no contact with a city that is “too much concrete, too much glass and too much steel.”

Here, says Rosenberg, there is nothing but life, and the time to enjoy it.

“It’s an oasis in the desert.”