Take pity – please – on Paradise Creek. Its conditions have been anything but heavenly as the urban creek drains built-up portions of National City.
Sure, the creek can run free through Kimball Park. But it is channeled underground where it meets the car dealerships of National City Boulevard. Paradise Creek resurfaces next to Kimball Elementary School, a stretch where an urban area once threw the worst it possibly could at a natural rivulet. Depending upon the tides and storm action, Paradise Creek carries fresh water under Interstate 5 to a salt marsh or allows brackish water to flow back up stream.
But Paradise Creek has friends, growing numbers of them (www.paradisecreek.org), and some in important places.
An effort to restore the creek and create a small urban interpretive park is now 85 percent complete, some 12 years and $1.5 million later.
Ted Godshalk, husband of a Kimball Elementary teacher, stepped in a dozen years ago to lead volunteers and twist arms for funding.
Once, Paradise Creek was clogged with grocery carts, tires, chunks of concrete, paper trash and street runoff mixed with oil and gasoline. Not to mention non-native plants, a threat to a saltwater marsh environment. Monthly cleanups on the first Saturday continue to erase man's damage as well as competition from plants that don't belong.
Important friends have stepped in – the California Coastal Conservancy, Metropolitan Water District, the National City City Council, county Supervisor Greg Cox.
The stretch of creek beside Kimball Elementary, best reached from West 19th Street, now is six-tenths of an acre of wetlands park. A shaded amphitheater that seats 120 is finished. Native plants and temporary irrigation are in place. A basin has been graded to catch creek overflow where stream meets tides, and offers flood protection to nearby businesses during rain storms.
Pilings for an elevated boardwalk still await the laying of planks. Ironically, man's mistreatment is causing the final delay. Over the years, too much debris has been dumped for the pilings to simply be pounded in. Instead, a more costly procedure must be used. (Think drilling and installing wood screws instead of pounding nails.)
Paradise Creek Educational Park already is a learning laboratory for the school next door. The amphitheater is in place for community events. A built-out city that can count its parks on one hand is about to have a sixth completed.
Reasonably soon, children and adults can walk around on self-guided tours and learn about the 14 types of native plants or the 31 bird species that try to call Paradise Creek their home.
Today, it still takes some imagination to visualize what will be. The native plants haven't taken hold, the boardwalk planks are missing. National City's community services director, Leslie Deese, and director of engineering, Steve Kirkpatrick, are still overseeing the completion of what so many have helped make possible.
Dedication is probably another two months away. Meantime, the snowy egrets find conditions much improved and don't seem to mind. And for the dedicated people, after 12 years, what's a couple months more?
