Just east of the San Francisco Bay Area is a part of California that's reminiscent of Holland (levees, flat farmlands, windmills), the Louisiana Bayou (crawdads, fishing boats) and Asia (Chinese settlements, swampy waterways).
It's the California Delta, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet to create a winding maze of waterways and islands. There are literally thousands of miles of sloughs, canals and rivers here. It's a boater's and fisherman's paradise, but even though the area is mapped it's easy to get lost if you're out in a boat.
We took off on a Friday afternoon in July on our first trip to the Delta, with our bicycles on the back of our car and camping gear in the trunk. We planned to rendezvous with our friends Peter, Patty and Randy at the Ryde Hotel. They had left earlier in the day with their small outboard motorboat to stake out a campsite.
The two-lane Highway 12 is bordered by rolling hills of golden brown until you reach Rio Vista, the gateway to the Delta. Here a steel-span bridge crosses a wide stretch of the Sacramento River. On the other side of the bridge, a left turn catches Highway 160 which follows the shore of the river past Isleton and on up to Walnut Grove.
Virtually all of the roads along the Delta are built up on levees, reinforced with rock on the water side and buildings and farmland on the other side. We pass fields of corn, pear orchards and yellow flowers.
We find the Ryde Hotel, after passing through Walnut Grove and crossing a drawbridge to Grand Island. The Ryde is an elegant old hotel that once hosted such luminaries as Al Jolson, Clark Gable and Herbert Hoover. Eventually, our friends arrive and after having drinks we retire to our campsite at Wimpy's Marina and dinner at Guisti's, a down-home Italian restaurant with huge family-style portions.
Saturday morning we ride our bicycles the seven-mile distance into Walnut Grove, where we eat breakfast at Alma's Café, a 1950s-style eatery where the town fire chief helps out in the kitchen and pours coffee refills. Then we pedal through the historic Chinese and Japanese portions of Walnut Grove and then head to Locke, about a mile up the road.
Locke is a virtual ghost town now, but in its heyday it was a thriving community of Chinese immigrants. Built in 1912, Locke is the only town in America built and inhabited exclusively by Chinese. Main Street was known for its gambling rooms, speakeasies, opium parlors and brothels. It also had cheap rental rooms for its population of farm laborers, mostly single men. In the early 20th century, Locke provided a sanctuary in a harsh and unwelcome world.
Locke has been declared an official California historic site, serving to protect its aging wooden buildings, some of which have been structurally reinforced to prevent them from collapsing. Most of the buildings are empty, but faded signs are still legible, like Kee Sing market and liquor store. The main business in this two-block-long town is Al the Wop's bar and restaurant. A few galleries and a museum dot the rest of the village.
The Dai Loy Museum (when it's open) is a must-see. Much of the interior of this building re-creates a Locke gambling parlor from decades ago, with wagering tables and money rooms, A Chinese-American woman docent at the museum tells us we can reach a little-used but large public stretch of the river by riding our bikes toward the back of Locke.
We ride along wooden sidewalks, past little shanty houses and out-of-the-way apartments. They rent must be cheap here, I think, and someone on the lam would never be found here. The trail narrows throw a meadow thick with brush and wild blackberries. “Watch out for poison oak,” someone warns. We reach a dirt road that borders the river and look for a beach to hang out and a launching area for Peter and Patty's boat.
We spend the rest of the weekend exploring the towns of Walnut Grove, Locke and Courtland and Grand Island and Ryer Island by car, bicycle and ferry. The islands are connected by either double-bascule drawbridges that open in the middle or cable-drawn ferries. The ferries are free, they carry only six cars at a time and they run continuously back and forth except for a 20-minute lunch and dinner break for the operator.
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