The Sacramento River at Knight’s Landing rounds the bend where commerce once demanded a draw bridge, but now the activity here is mostly small fishing boats. When I was a boy my Dad caught a big sturgeon near the bridge here. It was a magnificent big fish. I remember feeling a bit of sadness that it had been yanked out of the safety of the river.

Downriver from this village the Feather River flows into the Sacramento River twenty miles upstream from the City of Sacramento where the American River adds its bulk. Farther downstream the Sacramento joins the San Joaquin. The San Joaquin flows out into San Francisco Bay which empties out into the Pacific Ocean. Once when I was a young man, Gary Gasser and I put a two-person kayak into the river a hundred miles upstream at Red Bluff and paddled down to this place. That was at least fifty years ago.

The river’s main job now is not to carry freight or passengers but to deliver water from the snow melt of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to thirsty agricultural land and dozens of towns and cities.