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- Story Listed as: True Life For Teens
- Theme: Family & Friends
- Subject: Childhood / Youth
- Published: 05/30/2019
The Decoy
Born 1944, M, from Independence, Oregon, United StatesThe Decoy
Santa Clara Valley, California, lays between the Diablo Range to the east and the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west. Prior to it becoming the epicenter of Silicon Valley, it was mostly agricultural.
At its north end, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, is Alviso.
Alviso, long ago was a Spanish and then Mexican Ranchero of bull fights and fiestas. Back then, water fowl blacked the sky which silenced the quiet with honks, quacks and gull cries when disturbed.
For a brief period, it was an embarkment port for eager 49’er gold seekers on their way to the Sierras. It then settled into being a bawdy, boom town
After the 1906 earthquake the boom ended. It became a rundown, semi-ghost town due to flooding, its location near the end of San Jose's sewage line and its proximity to Santa Clara’s dump.
In the 1920’s the vast tidal marsh areas between Alviso and the deeper water of the Bay was expropriated and subdivided into shallow ponds by Leslie Salt Company to make “sea salt”.
Alviso was excluded from the frantic pace of development which swept the rest of Silicon Valley, a desolate, forgotten, backwater.
The town’s woebegone character, the salt pond levees to the open Bay and a rail line which traversed the town and led to the ghost town, Drawbridge were adventure attractions to boys from Santa Clara.
From its colorful past, the Alviso of yore retained one characteristic, duck hunting.
Duck hunters were divided into two groups, club members with leased blinds on Leslie Salt Company’s ponds and free lancers.
Club members accessed their blinds by boat and laid out a vast raft of decoys. They were aristocrat hunters who ate breakfast at before the morning shoot and dinner after at Vahl’s, a classic 1950’s Italian restaurant which retained respectability despite its Alviso location.
Free lancers were forbidden to trespass on Leslie Salt’s levees. Or its salt ponds Their lot was the rail line from where it left Alviso at Lane’s grocery store, a local landmark until it ran to Fremont in the East Bay. About midway, it crossed the confluence of the Guadalupe and Coyote Rivers and its ghost town Drawbridge. Why it was legal to walk the rail line and shoot a shot gun but not trespass on expropriated levees I never understood.
Free lancers shooting on the rail line did what was called “pass shooting”. They hid behind the rail embankment and waited until a duck winged overhead. Ducks learned to gain altitude prior to passing over the rail line. The result was pass shooters carried big guns with long barrels and heavy shot shells to sky scrape, like anti-aircraft gunners.
In Santa Clara, my friend Mike, at age 12 inherited a 12 gauge Browning automatic shotgun when his dad died. At that age, I’d bought a 16-gauge double barrel Fox shotgun from paper route earnings. The two of us rode our bikes with guns across the handle bars to hunt ducks.
The peak time for duck hunting is sunrise. In the dark, we parked at Lane’s grocery store and trekked out on the rail line. We’d walk until it met one of Leslie Salt’s levees. The levees ensconcing the ponds were a spider web which stretched to the Bay. There we walked past a posted Leslie Salt, red and white sign forbidding access.
Mike and I were levee poachers, not rail sky scrapers. Trespassing and hiding from Leslie Salt wardens enhanced our hunting adventures.
Once settled on a levee, we talked and shivered while awaiting the sun’s rise over the Diablo Range. With daylight, we crouched low and waited until ducks came toward us going from one pond to another. Once in shooting range we stood up and shot as they attempted to veer left or right or even back pedal in their fright. Usually we missed.
While the ponds were shallow the area next to the levee was deep as it was from this area the muck for the levee was extracted by dredge. When we shot at a duck, we tried to shoot so it would land on the levee or at least on the side of the levee from which the wind was blowing. If instead a it landed in a pond downwind, we frantically threw clumps of levee dirt to create waves to force it to shore, usually to no avail.
On the levee, we were a status above rail line pass shooters even if outlaws. We still looked out at the blinds in the center of the ponds surrounded by decoys with envy. They never had to throw clumps of dirt to retrieve a duck. We were lucky to shoot a duck or two because our prey were ducks who by chance happened to hop the levee where we were crouching. They with their comfortable blinds, decoys which lured the ducks and skiffs usually shot their limit of 11.
There is a better than dawn for duck hunting. It's when a high wind storm blows. It needs to be a real storm with white caps not only on the Bay but out on the ponds. One occurred on a November afternoon in 1958 when we were 14.
Mike and I rode our bikes to Alviso, parked them at Lane’s, and trekked out on the rail line to our favorite levee and tresspassed. The wind and rain blew hard. The ducks couldn’t settle down. Waves splashed water on their beaks. They sought refuge from pond to pond.
On a duck flight path between ponds, facing the wind, we crouched, stood up and shot over and over until we both had limits of 11, the only time we ever did. We tied their legs together and draped them as bundles over our shoulders to carry back then climbed atop the levee to leave.
As we faced the gale wind and looked out across the pond, we saw a miniature flotilla drifting toward us. Decoys were driven by the wind from the pond’s duck blind to the levee. Most were cheap balsa wood blocks painted white in the center and black at both ends without a head to lure blue bill ducks. They looked like miniature cop cars bobbing in the waves as they drifted toward us.
One, however, was a cop car with its red light on, a canvas back decoy.
I waited eagerly as it drifted closer, its lead anchor on a string dragging. It finally bobbed into my grasp, the real McCoy; a San Francisco Bay, hand carved, wood, canvas back decoy with a few shot shell dots to prove its service. I lugged it home as the trophy of the day.
It is a keepsake which has followed me through life despite many moves. It sits now on my fire place mantel and brings back the Alviso of my youth which few then knew or cared about. It wasn’t until middle age I experienced a tinge of remorse at the owner’s loss. In answer to him, who is surely dead now, I can say I took good care of it.
I recently re-visited Alviso. Unlike during my youth, development has finally seeped into to it despite its drawbacks due to outrageous Silicon Valley land values. The tidal areas are still misused to produce salt but are now part of a national park.
I didn't walk out on the rail line to a levee. Park status has resulted in swarms of visitors seeking the beauty of the marsh, the quaintness of a town bypassed, the vast open areas where tide lands meet land’s end and the numerous water fowl which far exceed the numbers of my duck hunting days.
It is no longer a place for youthful trespassing and poaching adventure.
The Decoy(Jim)
The Decoy
Santa Clara Valley, California, lays between the Diablo Range to the east and the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west. Prior to it becoming the epicenter of Silicon Valley, it was mostly agricultural.
At its north end, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, is Alviso.
Alviso, long ago was a Spanish and then Mexican Ranchero of bull fights and fiestas. Back then, water fowl blacked the sky which silenced the quiet with honks, quacks and gull cries when disturbed.
For a brief period, it was an embarkment port for eager 49’er gold seekers on their way to the Sierras. It then settled into being a bawdy, boom town
After the 1906 earthquake the boom ended. It became a rundown, semi-ghost town due to flooding, its location near the end of San Jose's sewage line and its proximity to Santa Clara’s dump.
In the 1920’s the vast tidal marsh areas between Alviso and the deeper water of the Bay was expropriated and subdivided into shallow ponds by Leslie Salt Company to make “sea salt”.
Alviso was excluded from the frantic pace of development which swept the rest of Silicon Valley, a desolate, forgotten, backwater.
The town’s woebegone character, the salt pond levees to the open Bay and a rail line which traversed the town and led to the ghost town, Drawbridge were adventure attractions to boys from Santa Clara.
From its colorful past, the Alviso of yore retained one characteristic, duck hunting.
Duck hunters were divided into two groups, club members with leased blinds on Leslie Salt Company’s ponds and free lancers.
Club members accessed their blinds by boat and laid out a vast raft of decoys. They were aristocrat hunters who ate breakfast at before the morning shoot and dinner after at Vahl’s, a classic 1950’s Italian restaurant which retained respectability despite its Alviso location.
Free lancers were forbidden to trespass on Leslie Salt’s levees. Or its salt ponds Their lot was the rail line from where it left Alviso at Lane’s grocery store, a local landmark until it ran to Fremont in the East Bay. About midway, it crossed the confluence of the Guadalupe and Coyote Rivers and its ghost town Drawbridge. Why it was legal to walk the rail line and shoot a shot gun but not trespass on expropriated levees I never understood.
Free lancers shooting on the rail line did what was called “pass shooting”. They hid behind the rail embankment and waited until a duck winged overhead. Ducks learned to gain altitude prior to passing over the rail line. The result was pass shooters carried big guns with long barrels and heavy shot shells to sky scrape, like anti-aircraft gunners.
In Santa Clara, my friend Mike, at age 12 inherited a 12 gauge Browning automatic shotgun when his dad died. At that age, I’d bought a 16-gauge double barrel Fox shotgun from paper route earnings. The two of us rode our bikes with guns across the handle bars to hunt ducks.
The peak time for duck hunting is sunrise. In the dark, we parked at Lane’s grocery store and trekked out on the rail line. We’d walk until it met one of Leslie Salt’s levees. The levees ensconcing the ponds were a spider web which stretched to the Bay. There we walked past a posted Leslie Salt, red and white sign forbidding access.
Mike and I were levee poachers, not rail sky scrapers. Trespassing and hiding from Leslie Salt wardens enhanced our hunting adventures.
Once settled on a levee, we talked and shivered while awaiting the sun’s rise over the Diablo Range. With daylight, we crouched low and waited until ducks came toward us going from one pond to another. Once in shooting range we stood up and shot as they attempted to veer left or right or even back pedal in their fright. Usually we missed.
While the ponds were shallow the area next to the levee was deep as it was from this area the muck for the levee was extracted by dredge. When we shot at a duck, we tried to shoot so it would land on the levee or at least on the side of the levee from which the wind was blowing. If instead a it landed in a pond downwind, we frantically threw clumps of levee dirt to create waves to force it to shore, usually to no avail.
On the levee, we were a status above rail line pass shooters even if outlaws. We still looked out at the blinds in the center of the ponds surrounded by decoys with envy. They never had to throw clumps of dirt to retrieve a duck. We were lucky to shoot a duck or two because our prey were ducks who by chance happened to hop the levee where we were crouching. They with their comfortable blinds, decoys which lured the ducks and skiffs usually shot their limit of 11.
There is a better than dawn for duck hunting. It's when a high wind storm blows. It needs to be a real storm with white caps not only on the Bay but out on the ponds. One occurred on a November afternoon in 1958 when we were 14.
Mike and I rode our bikes to Alviso, parked them at Lane’s, and trekked out on the rail line to our favorite levee and tresspassed. The wind and rain blew hard. The ducks couldn’t settle down. Waves splashed water on their beaks. They sought refuge from pond to pond.
On a duck flight path between ponds, facing the wind, we crouched, stood up and shot over and over until we both had limits of 11, the only time we ever did. We tied their legs together and draped them as bundles over our shoulders to carry back then climbed atop the levee to leave.
As we faced the gale wind and looked out across the pond, we saw a miniature flotilla drifting toward us. Decoys were driven by the wind from the pond’s duck blind to the levee. Most were cheap balsa wood blocks painted white in the center and black at both ends without a head to lure blue bill ducks. They looked like miniature cop cars bobbing in the waves as they drifted toward us.
One, however, was a cop car with its red light on, a canvas back decoy.
I waited eagerly as it drifted closer, its lead anchor on a string dragging. It finally bobbed into my grasp, the real McCoy; a San Francisco Bay, hand carved, wood, canvas back decoy with a few shot shell dots to prove its service. I lugged it home as the trophy of the day.
It is a keepsake which has followed me through life despite many moves. It sits now on my fire place mantel and brings back the Alviso of my youth which few then knew or cared about. It wasn’t until middle age I experienced a tinge of remorse at the owner’s loss. In answer to him, who is surely dead now, I can say I took good care of it.
I recently re-visited Alviso. Unlike during my youth, development has finally seeped into to it despite its drawbacks due to outrageous Silicon Valley land values. The tidal areas are still misused to produce salt but are now part of a national park.
I didn't walk out on the rail line to a levee. Park status has resulted in swarms of visitors seeking the beauty of the marsh, the quaintness of a town bypassed, the vast open areas where tide lands meet land’s end and the numerous water fowl which far exceed the numbers of my duck hunting days.
It is no longer a place for youthful trespassing and poaching adventure.
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