Jane Wolff’s Delta Primer, previewed in arcCA in 2001 and published by William Stout Books in 2004, is a tool for encouraging people “to look carefully at the landscape [of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta] and its dilemmas.” It proposes that “change can and should be informed by the richness and complexity of what already exists” and that “multiple readings and uses of the place can go forward together.” To model the Delta’s complexity and afford a means of comparing contested values, it is structured as a deck of playing cards, its suits representing four ways of understanding and using the landscape: as wilderness, garden, machine, or toy. Each card tells a story of a particular place. The 2 of Machines is about a moving building.
The aqueducts and the highway were built to convey valuable material—water and goods—from one place to another.
The story of Togo Shima and the headquarters building prefigures the aqueducts and the highway. It casts the river as a tool: a piece of transportation infrastructure.
Togo Shima, sometimes known as the Potato King of the Delta, had two ranches, one on Webb Tract and one on Bacon Island. In the 1920s or so, he decided to move the headquarters of his outfit from Webb to Bacon.
The headquarters building had been built on stilts to protect it from floodwaters. He took the building off its stilts, put it on a barge, and floated it to Bacon Farm Camp Number 3, where it still stands.
