success of sorts

This evening, on the way into San Francisco, I took a short detour through San Rafael.

In 1993-94 I wrote a wetland mitigation and monitoring plan and helped obtain a 404 permit for a small two-lane bridge associated with a road extension, and including a couple of acres of salt marsh restoration. The project hadn't gone anywhere immediately because of funding gaps, and then I got busy with bigger projects in other parts of the country. So even as I regularly visited my other California restoration from the pepriod, in Solano county, I assumed the one in San Rafael had never been built. No road, no mitigation. The engineer who had been PM on that project had moved on, so for years I had nearly forgotten about it.

Just a few months ago someone told me that the road had eventually been built after all, I'm not sure exactly when. So today I went to look. And there it was; the bridge, exactly as in the drawings; the salt marsh bordering the tidal slough, exactly as I'd helped design it, with all the right species of plants. The bordering bike trail, exactly as planned. A vibrant mixed-use surrounding community, impossible to be sure of back then when a contaminated vacant lot had been one of the nearest neighbors.

I need to go back with a camera and take a really close look. But it feels good to see projects taken to completion, and looking a lot like they're supposed to.