Bill Workman / SF Chronicle 15dec00
To Jim Johnson, San Francisquito Creek is a spiritual journey as well as the 11-mile-long meandering waterway that he watches over as its official streamkeeper.
For nearly four years, the 55-year-old Redwood City resident has held down the paid job of monitoring the creek watershed, which runs from Searsville Lake dam above Stanford University through five cities to the bay and is the boundary between San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
Long before that, however, Johnson, a former Protestant seminarian and student of mysticism who once traveled to India to be with his guru, had taken on as a personal crusade protection of the creek from both human depredations and the vagaries of nature.
It has been a daunting mission, but Johnson has achieved much over the past dozen years since he discovered several dead steelhead trout in the creek's trash-choked waters in November 1988, and took it upon himself to restore the long-neglected stream and its environs.
The latter include "El Palo Alto," the landmark 1,100-year-old redwood tree that looms over the creek's Caltrain trestle-crossing between Palo Alto and Menlo Park just east of El Camino Real.
Several months before he came upon the ill-fated fish, he had undertaken a one-man campaign to get Palo Alto officials to take better care of the towering redwood, an effort that eventually led to the city's installation of an automatic sprinkler on the tree's top that has kept it alive.
"I could have walked away and said all this was too much to deal with," Johnson said. "But I am a spiritual person and it felt like I was being presented by the universe with a set of problems that somebody just had to deal with."
Johnson said in explanation: "I knew the cosmos makes no distinction between the inner and the outer life, and you don't have to go off to a cave in Tibet. You can work on your spiritual self right here in this world."
Among other things on that real-world quest, Johnson has organized frequent creek cleanups by dozens of volunteers who have hauled out tons of trash; helped restore the waters as a steelhead run; founded Friends of San Francisquito Creek, a neighborhood lobbying organization; reported sewage dumps into the waters and other illegal incursions to authorities; and successfully worked to reclaim sections of the creekbed from homeless encampments that were fouling the area.
Johnson, a horticulturist who lived out of his car for awhile in the late 1970s after his marriage broke up and he was out of a job, knows firsthand what it's like to be homeless.
But the encampments were the biggest obstacle to the creek's revival, he said. But Palo Alto and Menlo Park, with the help of the Urban Ministry, a church-based organization that helps the poor, collaborated to clear the homeless from the creekbed and get them into shelters.
"I just wanted to get them out of the creek, get healthy and become productive members of society," he said.
In October, Johnson was presented with an award by Sustainable San Mateo County, an environmental organization, for all he has done to maintain the San Francisquito as a unique stretch of urban wilderness.
His efforts to raise public awareness of the stream's value to the Peninsula "will preserve the creek in as natural a condition as possible for future generations," said the award.
Meanwhile, as a recognized expert on the creek and its tributaries, Johnson is now playing a key role in the work of the regional watershed's Coordinated Resource Management and Planning group -- which he also helped establish and which includes representatives from 30 governmental, neighborhood and environmental groups -- to develop a major creek flood control project.
Cynthia D'Agosta, executive director of the year-old San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority, said when she took the post this summer after moving from Los Angeles, "Jim was the first person everyone directed me to. It's hard to pull away from any conversation with him, he knows so much of the history."
While many of his creekside accomplishments have come as a volunteer, Johnson now earns nearly $600-a-week as streamkeeper, a job that includes growing plants for watershed revegetation. He is paid by the Palo Alto Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation.
Johnson's affinity for the San Francisquito comes naturally. He grew up in Minnesota along the banks of the Mississippi River. "It was a Tom Sawyer life, " he said, of romping and rafting in nearby creeks and swamps with his playmates, children of the Red Wing Sioux tribe, whose reservation was close by the Johnson home.
When Johnson moved to the Peninsula nearly 30 years ago, he took up meditating on the San Francisquito's banks and drawing its flora and fauna on strolls along the dry creekbed in summer.
''It was wild nature, a place you could be away from the noise of the city, " he said. ''When you're down in there walking alongside the creek, you can't hear a car, or see a house. It's really very inspiring."
E-mail Bill Workman at wworkman@sfchronicle.com
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