Winners of our 3rd Annual Essay Contest were selected this past
spring. Excerpts from the winning essays in the middle school
and high school categories were included in our Summer
2003 Network News. Below are excerpts from our adult category
winner. The full text of all winning essays is available on the
Network website. This year’s topic, “Why Is Water
So Special” generated nearly 100 excellent essays, and we
look forward to our 2004 contest with great expectations. The
2004 theme will be announced in January.
Taughannock Creek, March 2003
Peggy Arcadi, Trumansburg, NY
2003 Cayuga Lake Watershed Essay Contest Winner —
Adult Category
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| Peggy Arcadi writes from Trumansburg,
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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. …
. 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. ….
