COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Kids are missing out on the gully

I would like to thank the Daily Pilot, reporter Amanda Pennington and photographer Mark Dustin for the great job they did in covering our story (“Boys are back in town,” April 15). We got a real kick out of the story, and we all had a hoot exchanging old memories with Pennington and Dustin. We toured the Environmental Nature Center off Dover Drive. This center is an environmental interpretation for our beloved gully, which runs next to Newport Harbor High School.

The gully was the most pristine wetlands I have ever seen. I discovered it in 1954, when I was 7 years old, and Mom decided it was safe for me to go that far from our home on Pirate Road. I remember making my way from 15th Street, where the gully began, along a shady path that meandered past twisted tree roots and a little stream.

Then I came upon the “great pool” of the gully. I remember pushing aside the cattails that grew thickly around the “great pool,” and gazing in disbelief at the unbelievable beauty before me. There were pond turtles and frogs sunning on the muddy banks. There were red-winged blackbirds squawking and protecting their hidden nests in the bunched cattails. Dragonflies were buzzing over the pool, and a western water garter snake was lazily gliding its harmless way across some bright green moss. Butterflies of all description, size and color danced in the air. Big yellow swallowtail butterflies were fluttering and feeding on the flowers of the wild licorice that grew in jungles all around the gully. Crayfish, pollywogs and mosquito fish moved below the surface of the waters. I was home.

It’s no coincidence that the three Payne kids who lived above the gully all became biologists. And many a biology student at Newport Harbor High School got an A in biology because of the gully, as one biology project was to collect 100 insect specimens and label them.

So try to imagine our collective shock. Try to imagine the sight of the grown Tom Payne, now a world-renowned biologist and fisheries consultant, standing on dry redwood mulch in the gully of 2007 where the “great pool” was bulldozed and asking in stunned disbelief, “Why would they do this to a wetlands?”

Our gully has been completely destroyed.

Gone is the world-class anise swallowtail, its wild licorice removed as a nonnative plant. The incredible trapdoor spiders are smothered out. The smallest butterfly in the world, the pygmy blue, is nowhere to be seen.

Newporters, most of us don’t live in your town anymore. But we would ask you to restore the gully for yourselves and for your children’s sake. Treasure is where you find it.

lives in Pacific Grove, Calif.