September 07, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

Streamkeeper leaving for India

by Bill D'Agostino

He's selling off his possessions and moving to a land he's visited only once.

But for Jim Johnson, it feels like another door is opening and he must walk through.

Johnson, the tireless streamkeeper for the San Francisquito Creek who has long viewed his advocacy and work for the waterway as spiritual, is retiring next month to move to India.

"My connection to India is very deep," Johnson said. "Going back is really going home."

Johnson, who is credited with healing the historic "El Palo Alto" tree in the late 1980s by convincing the city to install a sprinkler atop it, is planning to live in ashrams and other holy sites he visited in 1981.

"The last year I've been feeling the pull of India very strongly," said Johnson, 60, whose last official day is Sept. 7. "It's just time to pull up stakes and go."

Johnson's life has been punctuated by a series of such revelations and turnabouts. His passion for Indian spirituality began like a flash in 1979. While sleeping in his car, he had an elaborate nighttime vision of Krishna, the reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.

His local leadership to restore the 14-mile-long creek, which forms the boundary between San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, was equally sudden. While hiking in 1988, he found a dead steelhead trout, an endangered fish thought to have been lost to the creek. Around the same time, he also saw the wilting El Palo Alto, the 1,000-year-old symbol of both the city and Stanford University.

"It was a question, a silent question: 'What am I going to do about this?'" Johnson recalled. "I could have done nothing. The poorer I would have been."

During the past 18 years, Johnson has worked -- both as a volunteer and later as a paid employee for Acterra and other environmental groups -- on numerous efforts to restore and protect the watershed and its natural inhabitants. He's led campaigns to clean trash, ease the path for the spawning steelhead, install educational signposts and revegetate the banks with native plants.

"He's a Karma Yoga," said Jerry Hearn, a friend and vice president of Acterra's board. "He does his work through work, not so much from sitting and meditating."

When Johnson first began, the creek was overrun with weeds, drug users and homeless encampments. Now its natural splendor is returning.

"He has awakened all of us to the fact that there's this beautiful river running through our community," said Debbie Mytels, the associate director of Acterra.

Had Johnson not raised awareness in the late '80s and early '90s, and also brought many of the relevant agencies to the same table, the response to the creek's damaging flood in 1998 would have been less environmentally conscious, Mytels said.

He's an environmental leader who's led by example. A native plant nursery, recently approved by the Palo Alto City Council for Foothills Park, began in the backyard of Johnson's Redwood City home. He's also chased down criminals polluting the creek, such as an arsonist he spotted and then caught with help from Menlo Park police officers. Johnson testified in the subsequent trials, but was unsure whether sending the disturbed man to jail was the ideal course of action.

"Some problems are so deep they feel intractable," he said, ruminating aloud as he watered native plants near the office buildings that now tower over the creek in East Palo Alto. "But you can't just do nothing."

Sacred waters have run through the heart of the streamkeeper's life. He grew up in a Minnesota town along the Mississippi River and first encountered his spiritual guru, Anandamayi Ma, near the Ganges River in India.

In a recent letter to his friends, Johnson explained the reasons for his upcoming retirement and the mixed feelings about leaving the creek that has been his other guru.

"The thrill of anticipation for the new life before me is tempered by a twinge of sadness as I drink in the aching beauty of this land, knowing I may never see it again," he wrote. "Watch over it."

Staff Writer Bill D'Agostino can be e-mailed at bdagostino@paweekly.com.

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