Night-Shift Water Pro Daylights as Artist

By night he’s a water treatment engineer; by day, an artist. And Matt (“Woody”) Woodworth is embracing the challenge. 

He juggles 12-hour night shifts at Harry Tracy Water Treatment Plant with a creative trade at home, producing art that he shows at different local galleries.

After several years as a graphic designer in New York, the Pacifica natïve came back home and made a career shift to the water industry.  Now an engineer with our Harry Tracy Water Treatment Plant, he’s on duty four or five nights a week, monitoring the different treatment processes and making minor  but essential adjustments throughout the night to ensure the safety and high quality of our water before it goes out to others. 

So far Woody doesn't make art on a schedule. Instead, he'll head out for the nearby coast at different times of day to surf, take pictures, or plot out studies for the next works. 

Subject matter varies, but most of the fanciful abstracts, illustrations and painted surfboards or other beach findings reflect aspects of ocean life, like dune habitat, marine organisms, or riding the waves.  

He and partner Kelly Harris are also developing a children’s nature education project. They'll include coloring pages, cut-outs with different textures, and other activities to re-create  ocean experience on paper—or even instill the  kind of reverence that, for some, comes with the sea.

“It’s had a huge impact on my life,” Woody says. “Respect it, but have fun too.  When you’re there, you’re kind of like a visitor. It’s good for the soul. “

Still when a work night rolls around, and it’s time for the next shift at the plant, Woody’s up for that too. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he says. 

Love on the Watershed

The long-protected Peninsula Watershed is home to a broad diversity of native wildlife species, and mating season is now for a lot of them. 

To take a few February examples, our California state amphibians—the endangered red-legged frogs—are in chorus at restored Homestead Pond, various  small songbirds are beginning to nest in the woodlands, and the wide-ranging coyotes, which bond closely with the same mate for years, will soon be expanding their family units with new litters of pups. 

Happy Valentine’s Day to species everywhere, four-legged and two.

Life on the Watershed: The Unlikely Community Pillar

Rains and lingering  moisture bring out one of the unsung champions of the forest. 

The lowly banana slug may be short on appeal to us, but it is pivotal to forest nutrition and regeneration. As it propels its slow  way along the ground with one powerful little foot, it eats up fallen leaves and twigs, animal droppings, and other dead matter, which it decomposes and recycles into a dark nutrient-rich soil humus. The humus is excreted onto the forest floor, where it mixes in with the existing soils and fuels the roots of new and existing trees and other plant life.      

Unlike the reviled garden slug that can level your herbs and other greenery, this organism prefers dead stuff. 

The lowly banana slug is a woodland community pillar.