The first time I met David Yearsley he was pulling up to the Petaluma Marina - otherwise known as a collection of docks, weathered but loved watercraft of all sizes and a boat ramp squeezed practically beneath Highway 101's expanse over the Petaluma River - in a green motor launch with a hand outstretched. In the other he cradled a pipe that clearly fit his hand well.
"You must be Craig, or is it Greg, from LandPaths?" I was the relatively new (4 years in the job at that point) Director of LandPaths, and he part of the Riverkeepers Alliance, a national coalition inspired in part by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his work on the Hudson. The handshake was made, from boat up towards dock, and LandPaths had met the Petaluma Riverkeeper. I knew from the outset that I was clearly the visitor and he was going to size me up as whether I would be friend or foe!
Over the next few years "Dave" and LandPaths convened a number of river cleanups, explorations of the river channel proper and the side backwaters - or sloughs as they are more accurately defined - from the hulls of kayaks and canoes. Dave simply intuited that the dozens of folks under LandPaths' leadership coming to explore the land their tax dollars had protected by way of our County's Agricultural Preservation & Open Space District weren't there to motor or even sail, as fun as those things could be, but to apply sweat to paddle and propel themselves through his dominions.
As we got to know each other, paddling from the Marina oftentimes or Papa's Taverna off Lakeville Highway on other occasions, I got to know the Dave by knowing the river. Not flashy but substantive, a varied landscape of shiny cruisers and sunken wrecks, spartina grass choking some channels (which volunteers pulled out from their kayaks) and great expanses of wide, Mississippi style muddy water where a "flying boat" landed once next to a group of us. In his thigh-high mud boots, jeans and felt green shami shirts he was the real deal. I took to referring to him as a "marsh monkey" the way he adroitly hopped from boat to mud to tule patch while often dragging a kayak or even paddler who had gotten stuck in the mire.
Along with his wonderful wife Betty, Dave interpreted, cleaned up and advocated for the Petaluma River like no one in recent memory. Picnics were laid out, "string music" was most often made and great plans were unveiled for McNear Peninsula, a fallen barn here or a small cabin on piers lost in the folds of the sloughs.
Not long after we met, and the same year we crossed paths in Yosemite at a music festival and ended up playing late into the night, Dave had dropped a favorite pipe in some tall grass near the edge of the river on one particular river cleanup. While car batteries, auto tires and small hillocks of Styrofoam were being offloaded into a dumpster by kayakers - yes kayakers with full sized auto tires strapped to their decks that had been extricated from the muck at low tide - Dave turned his back on the spot he had lost his pipe and gave it up for lost. As my dear wife, Lee, knows I loathe giving up on lost items that are within a few steps and alluding capture owing to camouflage or diminishing daylight.
"Where'd you lose it" I asked after Dave had lamented his hopeless effort. "Oh, back over here..." he paced over twenty feet away as if rationalizing a chance to look one last time. I took an interest in this effort and told him we had to do it, as we searched on our knees. With the sound of large items being tossed into the dumpster from the trash cleanup efforts earlier in the day we crawled in our mud boots through the grass at Alman Marsh in what was only a 30 square foot area. "Is this it?" I asked with a wry smile as I raised a beautiful wood and hand-polished-to-glass-smoothness pipe aloft from my kneeling position. Dave lit up, "that's it!"
While the past several years have afforded me increasingly less time to be out with my fellow community members in the field and on flotillas with Dave and Betty on their beloved, "Petaloo," I have watched their efforts with great interest at McNear Peninsula (the barn to be renamed in Dave's honor) and up and down the river. So it was with sadness that I heard earlier this year of Dave's health turn with a cancer that came on with a tide that simply refused to turn and ebb.
DMY passed away on Labor Day, and a beautiful ‘sacred fire' was lit for him and tended by hundreds of friends day and night over the course of the next four days after he died at dawn. All this took place by the river, and mutual friend and musician Andy Rogers and I were fortunate to attend the final evening's fire in order to play a few tunes in Dave's honor with some other fine friends and musicians that loved Dave the father, grandfather, husband, brother, keeper of the river and its subtle beauties so easy to overlook. The tunes were a mix of joy and melancholy, and if spirits dwell a time in this earth it's unlikely that the marsh monkey himself wasn't there mixed with the marine layer chill as strains of Guthrie and Prine, Leadbelly and Alvin drifted with the smoke out over the River.
Dave's lesson in life, like his straight-forward acoustic music and passion for the river - at least per my recollection - is quite simple, it's finding that place that you connect with (some of us refer to it as a "sense of place") and allowing it to shape you as you shape it. Dave did this for the benefit of the river as a wild ecosystem and as a place for people to celebrate and to "come down home to." Unlike his favored pipe, Dave of the Petaluma River won't be coming our way again now that we've lost him. Finding that place to make our stand, to advocate for, to dig our heels in and treat with respect and share with others, however, is something we can - and should all - take from the example of Dave's life.
For more reflections on David Yearsley, visit Friends of the Petaluma River webpage
Craig Anderson
LandPaths Executive Director
It was with disbelief that I picked up the phone to hear the news late Tuesday evening, January 18, that Peter Kingston was gone. My brother Brooks, who's art hangs in Shirlee and Peter's home and who had parented, hiked, played tennis with and been a dear friend of Peter's for years, was on the other end of the line.
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