COLUMN ONE : Delta Blues: Trouble in Paradise? : Old-timers regret the way life has changed in the Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary. The pristine world at the heart of their lives and the state’s complex water system is threatened by technology.

ISLETON, Calif. —  No concoction of nature, with the possible exception of the foreboding San Andreas Fault, is as intertwined in the daily lives of Californians as these 700 miles of meandering rivers and overgrown sloughs.

Through a tangle of levees and canals, beneath drawbridges and around farm islands sprinkled white with pear blossoms, flows the drinking water for 20 million people, saved from the salty fingers of the sea by an engineering feat of pumps and giant pipes.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, largest estuary on the West Coast, is as essential to modern California as the snowfall that buries the Sierra Nevada in winter and splashes seaward in spring. Before any mountain water reaches the kitchen sinks and desert gardens of Southern California, it must pass through this confluence of the mighty Sacramento, the tired San Joaquin and a handful of lesser rivers.

Bob King appreciates the importance of all that, having spent much of his life in water-dependent Kern County. But when he retired to a riverfront home here 14 years ago, the delta simply fit his idea of paradise.

King, 70, has wasted away many sultry afternoons on the water, casting for striped bass, sturgeon, shad and catfish. “This place is an addiction,” he told a visitor aboard his 22-foot fishing boat, adrift on a backwater bend.

“Just look around you,” he said, gesturing toward levees capped in thick bulrush and a sky flecked with migrating ducks. “It is gorgeous.”

For all its pristine beauty, the delta is becoming best known as an ecological catastrophe in the making. Gov. Pete Wilson announced solemnly last year that “the delta is broken” and in desperate need of repair. Two delta fish species have been declared endangered, and others are likely to follow.

King’s years on his boat qualify him to explain why this place is talked about so much these days in government corridors, farm belt coffee shops and science labs around the state.

“I am sick about it, just sick,” the ruddy-faced fishing guide mumbled between drags on a Marlboro, his fourth since leaving the dock in Rio Vista an hour earlier. “The fishing used to be so-o-o-o good.”

There are many culprits, but most fingers point to two flat-roofed buildings about 25 miles south of here. Inside, massive pumps encased in concrete siphon billions of gallons of water--enough to fill San Francisco Bay each year--from the shallow delta channels and funnel it into canals that feed distant cities and farms.

Decades of pumping have upset the fragile ecosystem hidden beneath the surface of these braided channels, which pocked fishing boats share with sleek speedboats and luxury houseboats. The pull of the pumps can be so powerful that waterways like Old River and Connection Slough sometimes defy the law of gravity and flow upstream , away from the sea.

In short, scientists say, the thirst of human beings has grown too great for nature to handle, pitting Californians against the delta environment in a high-stakes tug of war. Threatened are two-thirds of the state’s drinking supply, water for some of the most fertile farms the world has known, the ecological vitality of a premier estuary and a way of life for a host of self-described “river rats.”

“The problems with the fish are a good indicator that the whole estuary itself is in trouble,” said marine biologist Dale Sweetnam, who trawls delta channels conducting fish counts for the state. “It is the tip of the iceberg.”

For King and his fishing buddies, the best way to appreciate this complex state of affairs is from the vantage point of the delta’s sleepy waterways. The estuary’s official boundaries contain an area the size of Orange County--a crooked triangle extending roughly from Sacramento to Stockton to Antioch--but the place old-timers see etched in the back of their eyelids when dozing off, fishing rod in hand, is more intimate.

Their delta straddles state highway 12 between the old steamboat landing of Rio Vista and the tiny former packing town of Terminous near the Little Potato Slough drawbridge. There, shoulderless levee roads crisscross thinly populated islands with names like Andrus, Bethel, Bouldin and Grand.

Huddled along the riverfronts are a string of tired old towns. Some date from the great Gold Rush, others from the arrival of the railroads. Many of the earliest settlers were Cantonese immigrants attracted by work on the railroad and the first primitive levees, then just mounds of dirt piled by hand at 13 cents a wheelbarrow.

The ramshackle town of Locke is the last of the Chinatowns, a levee outpost sometimes smothered in dense, ground-hugging tule fog. Today, just 19 of Locke’s 69 residents are of Chinese ancestry, but its one-block collection of collapsing clapboard buildings and turn-of-the century museums has made it a favorite tourist curiosity.

Longtime Locke resident and poet Laura Ulewicz has written of her riverbank town:

Somehow I have not spoken really, of the river--so big, so obvious to our lives.

It’s hard to remember the important things. Surely it wraps itself around all of our words and moistens them.

Summers. It’s why we’re cool at night with breezes in the cottonwoods, and what the boaters come for; and why we’re not a desert; and how if you drive off the road you drown.

Across the Sacramento from Locke, King stopped his boat near a towering oak on the bank.

“I remember the good old days there, boy!” roared fishing partner Dan Furtado, 46, a native of these waterways. The part-time car salesman speaks with a delta drawl and proudly advertises his life’s credo on a baseball cap: “Best way to keep from paying taxes: Don’t Work. Go Fishing.”

The fishermen stared at the big oak for a long minute. King, a retired sheriff’s deputy known among his friends as S.O.B. (Sweet Old Bob), finally broke the silence. “That tree there is famous,” he said. “There were a lot of fish caught there. I mean a lot of fish. “

Fishermen have been known to exaggerate, but the tale of fishing’s demise in the delta cannot be dismissed as a product of nostalgic anglers’ overly active imaginations.

There are fewer fish--dramatically fewer--and state biologists, sport fishing groups, bait shop owners and government agencies have documented the decline.

At Hap’s Bait Shop, a block from the Rio Vista waterfront, business is so slow that the inventory now includes not only such staples as bloodworms and mudsuckers but also bread and milk.

Salmon populations have dropped so markedly that many are bred in hatcheries, and the winter-run chinook has been listed as a threatened species. Striped bass, once the mainstay of the commercial and sport fishing industries, also are hard to come by.

Another sign of fishing’s demise is the closed control gates on the delta cross channel, upstream from here. The mile-long channel was built 42 years ago to divert water from its seaward course into the interior delta and toward the pumping plants. The gates have been closed since January, in part to keep ocean-bound salmon from becoming lost in the delta’s maze of sloughs and streams and, ultimately, being killed by the pumps.

Those fish lucky enough to make it past the cross channel face other obstacles downstream. About 1,800 small irrigation pumps--their valves hissing incessantly like angry snakes--siphon water out of the delta directly into fields of pear trees, asparagus and alfalfa, delivering countless fish to their deaths.

But the biggest danger lurks near the town of Tracy, at the delta’s southern tip. In two low-lying concrete buildings about a mile apart, protected behind gates and chain-link fences, are the pumps capable of making rivers flow uphill. Two stories high, their turbines consume enough electricity to light every home in San Diego.

The smaller of the plants has been run by the federal government for more than four decades, taking water to irrigate farms and towns in the Central Valley. The second plant was opened by the state in 1969 and provides water to cities and agriculture from the Bay Area to the Mexican border.

Together the plants provide the heartbeat of California’s vast waterworks, driving a circulatory system of canals and aqueducts that spans thousands of miles; if the pumps were to stop, much of the state would shrivel up from thirst.

When the turbines are rumbling, the mixed-up flows in the delta channels carry thousands of disoriented fish toward the pumps. They often become trapped in a large collecting pool near the state plant, where many are eaten by predators or sucked into the pumps.

Expensive metal screens at the pump intakes keep out most of the fish, which are then loaded into trucks and dumped back upstream. But some fish die at the pumps or are inadvertently shipped along with the water into the southbound aqueducts. So many young winter-run salmon were dying at the plants early this year that the federal government forced the state to stop the pumps.

After years of unnatural winnowing, the number of fish in the delta has dropped precipitously.

“This system used to be self-renewing, but by changing how the water flows through the system the fish have not been able to adapt fast enough,” said John Beuttler, head of United Anglers of California and a passenger on King’s boat. “Biological systems are used to adapting over millenniums, not weeks, or months or years.”

King shifted into gear and continued the tour, pointing his boat toward Georgiana Slough, one of his favorite hideaways. Unlike many of the delta’s engineered channels--only a layer of concrete removed from resembling the paved rivers of Southern California--Georgiana’s levees are thick with bulrushes. The slough’s path seems to bow left, then right, with the fancy of the morning breeze.

Just off the bow, a splash--sturgeon, King guessed--sent perfect circles gliding toward the boat. A flock of speckle-bellied geese saluted the entourage with a surging V-formation, followed by a lonely white heron and a pair of cormorants running for cover on the shaded river bank.

The delta and nearby Suisun Bay are popular resting places for migratory birds along the Pacific Flyway.

Where Georgiana Slough passes beneath Tyler Island Bridge, one of dozens of delta drawbridges, Eddie Petersen has a bird’s eye view of the estuary and its sprawling island farms.

Petersen, 66, toils from a sagging armchair draped with a worn afghan, his fourth chair in 46 years as bridge tender. His routine is simple: When large boats approach, he manipulates a panel of flashing lights and switches to swing open the creaking steel bridge. Small boats can slip beneath unnoticed; some winter days, hours pass without Petersen lifting a finger.

“It is peaceful here,” Petersen said softly, so as not to disturb a mallard bolting a wad of bread. “I don’t think I will ever move.”

A merchant in town says locals know the backward pace here as “delta time,” an inexact measure of existence observed in the “Gone Fishing” signs on shop windows and fleeting promises to tend to practical matters some other day.

Still, Petersen complains of streams of “green slimy stuff” passing beneath his bridge, and says he no longer buys a fishing license because he doesn’t dare eat the catch. Studies and surveys point to pollution from farm runoff, sewage and industrial waste.

“We went to Disneyland a few years ago and were driving up Interstate 5 and saw the (California) aqueduct,” Petersen recounted. “I said to my son-in-law, ‘There is the water from Georgiana Slough. It looks cleaner than it does at home.’ ”

As he navigated out of the Georgiana and into the Mokelumne and San Joaquin rivers, King blamed the delta’s decline on “wealthy corporate farmers” who waste water. That’s a sticky sentiment in a place married to agriculture.

Although the waterways and marinas are more popular--there are more than 120 marinas, resorts, harbors and yacht clubs--farming defines the delta’s landscape and much of its history.

The first Europeans found a vast tidal marsh where mosquito swarms filled the sky and grizzly bears grabbed salmon from wild rivers. “A great plain as level as the palm of the hand,” wrote Spanish explorer Pedro Fages and Father Juan Crespi, who happened on the estuary in 1772 after discovering San Francisco Bay.

The rich peat land was flooded by tides several times a day, but the farming potential was obvious. Otto Von Kotzebue, a captain in the Russian Imperial Navy, visited the delta during the 1820s and wrote of its “uncommonly fertile” river banks and delectable wild grapes.

“The many rivers flowing through this fruitful country will be of the greatest use to future settlers,” Von Kotzebue predicted in his travel log.

Crude levees of tule sod built by would-be farmers began to reclaim the land in the 1850s, and today’s island landscape took shape. But nature resisted man’s control. Historian Richard Dillon wrote of floods in 1861 and 1862 as “seemingly the greatest inundation anywhere since Noah cast off,” rupturing levees, submerging towns as far inland as Sacramento and washing Rio Vista off the map.

Levee breaks--from earthquakes or winter floods--remain a constant worry to farmers. A double levee failure in 1986 flooded 8,000 acres on Tyler Island and threatened the Sacramento River town of Walnut Grove.

Loss of the lightweight peat soil to oxidation and wind is another physical threat to the delta. With the soil no longer replenished by river sediments, the islands sink lower beneath river level, increasing the pressure on aging levees.

“It is like (a) little Holland here,” explained Rio Vista bookkeeper James R. Lauritzen Jr. “Every year this peat land just kind of blows away a little bit and disappears as it is being farmed. When we have had floods, they have scoured out peat as low as 70 feet below sea level.”

As if those problems don’t worry farmers enough, the highly organic peat sometimes catches fire and smolders for months.

As King’s boat twisted toward the Sacramento after skirting several islands, the presence of agriculture was overwhelming. Farm tractors chugged along dirt levee roads while low-flying biplanes dusted riverfront crops, kissing treetops and flirting with motorists and boaters below.

It is farming that gives the delta its rural feel--the sense of time suspended during a much simpler era--as well as its austere beauty. Today, two of every three acres is farmed and sales of crops and livestock top $400 million yearly, easily making agriculture the area’s dominant enterprise.

Frank Silva’s family has farmed on the river’s west bank since 1919, when his Portuguese immigrant father settled on Grand Island. Silva, 81, reared six children on the land and still sweats three to four hours a day in the fields. He knows the delta’s sloughs and channels like the smiles of his grandchildren.

Out in the pear orchard one day, maneuvering a backhoe to unclog a drainage ditch, he lamented the future of delta farming. But to his way of thinking, the life can’t be beat.

“It is obviously a good place to live,” he bellowed. “No urban sprawl. No blacktop. And this is clean dirt. There isn’t even dirty dirt here!”

Steering the boat back to the Rio Vista dock, King said he understood the farmers. He used to grow alfalfa and corn in Colusa County, but he moved to the delta for the fishing--the kind of fishing he no longer can enjoy here.

The sonar fish detector mounted on King’s dashboard served as a constant reminder of how dramatically times have changed. In two hours on the water, the device found only three fish.

Life in the Delta

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the largest river delta on the West Coast. A popular recreation site, it also serves as the hub of the state’s complex water delivery system. Rivers flow into the delta, where giant pumps capture water for shipment to Central and Southern California.

Central Valley watershed: Streams and rivers over a wide area of California supply the delta with fresh water.

Sources: California Department of Water Resources, state Water Resources Control Board