Mesa Musings: Good ol’ Back Bay recalled fondly

I experienced my coolest fieldtrip ever in the spring of 1956.

I was enrolled in Mr. Gilbert’s sixth-grade class at the Lindbergh School at Orange Avenue and 23rd Street in Costa Mesa.

Gilbert’s class visited the white cliffs of … Dover? No, it was a place far more enchanting than that! We traipsed three blocks to the east of our schoolyard to visit the white cliffs of … Upper Newport Bay.

Actually, at that time, everyone I knew referred to it as the Back Bay, never Upper Newport Bay. Today, it’s one of Southern California’s last remaining coastal wetlands, providing a habitat for migratory waterfowl, shorebirds and all kinds of endangered bird and plant species. It’s home to 30,000 birds during the winter months.

In the spring of ’56 we were yet many years away from the bay becoming an ecological reserve. And, it would be decades before the Upper Newport Bay Nature Preserve would be established. Fashion Island was not yet intruding on the bay’s natural profile.

For us sixth-graders, it was just the good ‘ol Back Bay sitting in our backyard: a pristine landscape of bluffs, birds, mud flats and salt marshes. We looked upon it as the “bay with high banks.”

In fact, that’s precisely what the Spanish called it a couple of centuries earlier, Bolsa de Gengara.

Upper Newport Bay’s white cliffs are comprised mostly of microscopic diatoms — a common phytoplankton — formed 15 million years ago. The Dover cliffs are chalk. I’ve now seen both, and I’ll take our diatoms!

The Santa Ana River carved out Upper Newport Bay during the Pleistocene Epoch, and the bay’s earliest human inhabitants arrived 9,000 years ago. Until 1862, the bay flowed directly into the Pacific, with no Balboa Peninsula, Balboa Island or Lido Isle to obstruct it.

In 1956, we sixth-graders in Mr. Gilbert’s class each carried a sack lunch and walked the three long blocks down 23rd to Irvine Avenue, which marked the western boundary of the bay. It was a glorious spring day.

We followed Mr. Gilbert along a trail that took us down to the bay itself. We took off our shoes and followed the shoreline for a short distance, allowing our feet to turn black in the muck.

We then tiptoed across a board that looked like the boards painters utilized to stand on while painting multi-story buildings. The board connected the “mainland” with the long dike that bisected the northern quadrant of the bay. We crossed the bay on the dike, from west to east.

As we crossed, we peered into the northeast corner of the bay and saw the huge white “dunes” of the “salt works.” The lucrative salt works were established in the 1930s, but were ultimately destroyed by winter storms in 1969.

After reaching the far shore, we stood beneath the bluffs that today are home to Newport Beach’s Eastbluff community. No such place existed then.

We sat at the base of the bluffs and ate our sandwiches. Several adventurous students climbed the bluffs. The school district didn’t seem too worried about liability in those days!

Upon reaching the top, instead of seeing row upon row of houses and condos, we saw nothing but tumbleweeds, jackrabbits, scrub vegetation and the occasional eucalyptus tree. It was a rolling tableland, untamed and beautiful.

We spent the better part of the day with our toes in the water, digging for shells, climbing the bluffs and socializing with friends.

I followed Mr. Gilbert that spring day in 1956 across the Back Bay. Little did I realize that slightly more than 30 years later I’d join him again — this time with his wife, Jean, at his side — on a tour of the Holy Land. We attended the same Costa Mesa church.

I carried with me to Israel a small stone from the Back Bay. Without ceremony, I quietly deposited it in the Sea of Galilee.

My bay betwixt the bluffs became forever linked with the little sea of mercies, half a world away.

JIM CARNETT lives in Costa Mesa. His column runs Tuesdays.