Karin Zirk, founder and ring master for the Friends of Rose Creek, has a penchant for the downtrodden, and Rose Creek qualifies in every respect. The stretch that runs from Route 52 south along the 5 and into Mission Bay has, over the decades,  been ignored, shunted aside, polluted, filled with trash and invasive plants, pinched between buildings, train tracks and highways, and, in stretches, trapped in concrete. Yet Karin founded Friends of Rose Creek in 2004 to salvage this beleaguered stretch of water as a place for wildlife and for people.

One Sunday afternoon, Karin led the way to Rose Creek behind the orange and yellow Zebra 3 Garage in Pacific Beach.  She pushed her way through the bushes, scouting for informal paths.  She passed an old shopping cart, a piece of clothing mashed into the leaves and some cardboard, a collection she referred to as "an abandoned house".  She bristles at the anti-homeless talk she encounters among people who sometimes attend Friends of Rose Creek meetings. "I find it offensive we're going to eliminate non-traditional lifestyle people," she said. Nevertheless, she added, "you can't be littering, you can't be polluting."  To balance her twin passions - defending the homeless and the creek - she envisions a recreational trail here that would discourage people from setting up the kind of full-scale encampments that now exist.  "People sleeping out here isn't the problem," she says. "Encampments are, because there is no trash and sewer service."

It had rained the day before, and the creek burbled by. Karin leapt across the first narrow branch and stood on an island of cobbles. Now 45 years old, she sometimes sees her whole life as a stereotype of her times: in the 1970's she ran away from home when she was 17, hitchhiked around California and ended up in San Francisco; she spent two years traveling around the country; in the 1980s she attended countless demonstrations on Central America; she has lived as the "token white person" in a Rastefarian community that organized concerts in a medium security prison ward; she spent a summer gathering signatures for a statewide environmental petition that failed, and for years has attended the Rainbow Gathering, an ad hoc event of up to 20,000 people that camps each summer on Forest Service land. She has chained herself to bulldozers to stop the logging of old growth forests and "couldn't for the life of me get arrested - I think it's because I look like Pippi Longstocking and who wants to arrest Pippi Longstocking?"

Standing in the midst of the creek, she did look like Pippi - freckles, a pigtail sticking through the back of her baseball cap, a delightful childlike sparkle in her eyes and upturned corners of her mouth as she constantly challenges everyone to question their assumptions, to care, to rearrange the mechanisms of government and institutions.

Now she is working on what she calls "the other side of the fence" - rather than protesting, she has set goals she thinks institutions like the city will support. A main one, is to transfer jurisdiction for this stretch of Rose Creek from city departments that handle sewers and street runoff to Park and Recreation. She has enlisted the help of the Rose Creek Watershed Alliance to provide things Friends of Rose Creek, as a small all-volunteer community group, could not accomplish on its own:  technical expertise like hydrology studies and help negotiating city hall.

Pippi - er, Karin - took on the cause of Rose Creek when she bought a house in Pacific Beach to live with her mother, who was disabled from a stroke. It was not by a long shot the house she wanted, but the only house she could afford. Its one saving attribute was that Rose Creek flowed by the back yard. "We had a discussion, the creek and I," Karin says. "It said it needed help." She told the creek she had a fulltime day job in the corporate world, and another fulltime job managing her mother's care. "We argued, the creek and I," Karin says. Then one day she met Robert De la Rosa, who was picking up trash in the creek and had for years worked for its restoration. He told her he was moving away and said, "You're in charge."

As she stood on the cobble island, Karin pointed out how the creek sounded just like any creek rushing over rocks.  Its color, however, was cloudy, its surface swirling with foam. Its banks were lined with thick fountains of invasive pampas grass.  Lodged in the water were a purple and white striped chaise lounge, a large blue plastic tarp, and unidentifiable pieces of wood from boxes or furniture. "Before this," she said, "I only knew how to not wreck a creek - it's very simple. Don't pollute it, don't erode the banks.  But "un-ruining" a creek is immensely complicated."

She snapped a photo of the view upstream, where willows bent over flowing water, a small, idyllic-looking slice in the reality around her. These are the visions of the creek she presents to people - as she puts it, not "what is" but "what could be".

Almost 20 years ago, Karin says she visited Big Bend National Park in Texas where she hiked to a cliff and looked out over the Rio Grande River and Mexico on the other side. "It started dawning on me that somebody made this happen, that one person, or a group of people said, we have to save this place. The only way for me to say thank you, to honor those people who came before, is to carry on that torch and do more."

Karin emerged from the world of Rose Creek from behind the garage, which restores automobiles, and where a cannibalized stretch limo sat behind a chain link fence. Karin, champion of a this community-based restoration project, got on her bike and peddled off toward her home on Rose Creek.