Taughannock Creek, March 2003

Peggy Arcadi, Trumansburg, NY

Peggy Arcadi

Taughannock Creek is celebrating the March thaw. The rushing water tears at snowy banks and pushes through the winter's ice, proclaiming the change of seasons and, perhaps, a recovery from the drought that left the creek bed dry and quiet last year. Without water, last summer's woods were stilled. Animals, birds, crayfish and minnows, even water bugs and mosquitoes disappeared. The creek banks cracked, plants dried up, trees drooped. Swimming holes receded to shallow bath water. Showering miniature waterfalls slowed to a trickle and stopped. The contrast to this raucous March day could not be greater; already birds are shouting in the trees, deer tracks stop at creek's edge and turn away again, and on flat muddy banks small shoots of green emerge. When I sit by the running waters of the creek, I feel like I'm listening to my own blood flow.
The creek brings life: this message seems plain to me, but not, it would seem, to everyone. I visit this stretch of creek in all seasons and moods, mine and the creek's. The creek never fails to restore me to peace, to interest me or to buoy an already happy day. But I am also brought, here in the woods with no human dwelling in sight, face to face with our most cavalier treatment of the natural world.
It seems a gift from the earth, water appearing in a spot in the fields that seems no different, on the surface, from any other spot, gathering to itself more and more water from invisible sources to produce the drama of Taughannock Falls. The creek ripples along with its cheerful conversation, and even in its dry season shares secrets: little caves, stones with holes bored through, the discarded exoskeleton of a crayfish. Over the years the creek bed has altered, at times devouring the bank and flooding through the nettles, then shrinking to a rocky stream. Fallen trees have made bridges that later rot or wash away. But the creek remains a welcoming presence, offering its various faces, calm or passionate, flowing or locked in ice, music in the rain, company in the snowy woods, running away out of the woods and yet staying right here at the same time. This is what I love about the creek, the sense it gives me of movement and connection, and at the same time, its constancy.
The creek's animation may belie its health. Standing on the bank I am reminded that through the water flowing here I am connected to a living, and fragile, cycle. It emerges from the earth, traverses the woods, and travels not as the crow flies but as the creek meanders, to Cayuga Lake, ten miles distant. It is barely a capillary in a system that viewed from above looks like the arteries and veins and organs of the planet. But I know that every part of this living system of waters affects the whole. Researchers have found arsenic in a nearby creek that feeds the lake. Farm chemicals and liquid manure cascade down the steep bank just above the spot I visit. Leftover silage washes down in storms and melting snow. Freshly dumped household garbage, including appliances, clothing, construction debris and furniture are heaped at the top of the bank, waiting to tumble down and join the rusted car that sits below.
When I visit the creek I am aware that my happiness is made, in part, by the existence of this sparkling presence in the woods. The pollution around the creek makes me angry, probably for selfish reasons but also in the way that seeing a child abused by someone who is older and should know better would anger most people; the creek cannot defend itself, and in any case, such abuse should be avoidable. I wish that we could be concerned about water pollution for the sake of the water, and not just the life it supports. But as long as we can turn a tap and water flows out, water that is not foul-smelling or brown with filth, we seem able to ignore the fact that pollution of water is pollution of everything we know, of our very cells. The evidence that we cannot live without water is in our bodies, mostly water, and in the belief that once through our water phase, we return to dust. Yet our human selfishness doesn't seem to stop us from dumping garbage along creek banks, factory sludge in lakes, and chemical waste out of smokestacks that later falls with the rain. Our belief in human ingenuity, the endless resources of the earth and our right to exploit them is intact. This is the belief, attributed to adolescents, of the infallibility of the human body writ large. If our tap carried water smelling of liquid manure along with a few bits of silage and sheetrock, maybe we'd consider keeping the source clean.
Sometimes, when I am walking to the creek, I see a woman hurrying away through the woods. Someone described her to me as a hermit. I once encountered her, and she worried that she would be caught trespassing by the creek. I have seen her pick up the odd bottle or can that turns up in the water, and I think: how much better a "trespasser" who picks up garbage than an owner who dumps it. I know that ownership is linked with the license to use: objects, vehicles, land. Stewardship suggests a different relationship, one that could be developed with every creek in the watershed, and with the lake as well. A creek steward could be part of a bigger network, increasing awareness of the creeks, their problems and solutions, using education and possibly legislation as tools in protecting the watershed. I like to think that for every new load of trash near its banks, there is a watchful presence or two trying to help the creek. I don't know if personalizing this effort is necessary or possible: economic conditions, laws, and proximity lead to conditions near the creek that are less than desirable, but responsibility for these conditions lies in our culture as much as in individuals. When I imagine approaching the congenial farmers who in dumping their garbage are merely continuing a family tradition of using their land to meet their needs, I picture them dismissing me as a naïve environmentalist. But I think they would be receptive to a group, including their neighbors and other farmers, with information showing how all over the watershed an effort is being made to clean up the creeks. I don't believe that everyone thinks water is special, in fact I think most people take it for granted, but I think that they could come to value their own role in protecting it, and eventually, to value it for its own sake. We need to demonstrate that even if you can't see it, it is there: your own little world is a microcosm of the whole. The creek is my microcosm.
A farmer friend of mine told me recently that she only takes a bath once a week, using just a few handfuls of water most days because she thinks we are wasting and polluting the earth's supply, which she believes will run out soon. She deeply appreciates her weekly bath. Another friend of mine lives in New York City, a stone's throw from two significant rivers and the ocean. She goes each day to swim in a rooftop swimming pool with a view of the river because, she says, her city life deprives her of her deep need for contact with water. While my friends' use of water is clearly divergent, I think that their relationship to it is identical: they have never expressed to me similar feelings about any other element, or anything else in their daily lives. I don't know if most people can articulate their relationship with water this way, but if they could, they might express in a positive way exactly why the world's waters should be prized, cherished, restored to health and protected.
Though the idea of decreasing, or even eliminating, pollution seems daunting, the creek by its very existence seems encouraging. As a child I used to be taken on a road that passed Onondaga Lake, and the game was to see who could smell the lake first and then who would groan the loudest at the horrible odor. We never knew what made the lake smell - "pollution," they said, but of what sort we couldn't imagine. What could you dump in a lake to make the whole thing stink? These days I can't tell by the smell that I'm approaching the lake. When I'm confronted with the scale of human pollution, I like to remember that the natural world responds to our efforts to treat it better.
I would like to make the case that water should be protected for its own sake and for the natural world whose existence depends on it, not for the selfish needs of the humans who live so out of harmony with that world. If we withdrew altogether from natural areas our impact on them would be measurably decreased. But whether we visit bodies of water or not, we affect them. Our visits to these places may make us more aware and better able to educate others. The practical reasons for protecting the creek can be condensed into one: pollution is destructive, whichever view you take, whether you want to protect the natural world or only people who, though so much a part of it, hold themselves apart. But just as under the creeks and rivers and lakes is an unseen, subterranean world of waters, so are there reasons for protecting the earth's water that are intangible, emotional, impractical, but no less real, and possibly useful in deciding the fate of every link in the chain of life. Water makes us feel - alive, happy, restored, clean, at peace, a part of the earth that, like each small body, leaf, plant, tree, is sustained by its gift of life.