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Where the river stops running

Natural History, Sept, 2006 by Tim Palmer

Home was on a broad ridge where the river began. You couldn't see rippling pools, waterfalls, or rapids there. In fact, you couldn't even find our spring unless you looked for it.

My family's land was high in the watershed, stitched into the fabric of Appalachian foothills. As a kid I gradually pieced together the logic that the puddles and wet swale alongside our garden were somehow connected to the spring. When raindrops and snowflakes fell on our soil, they began a traceable journey downhill, bound for the Gulf of Mexico, 1,500 miles away.

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As I grew older, I could count my years by how far downstream I had explored--every bend opened wonders to me. Beyond its outlet, our spring became a creek that ran down through a field, and out to a deepening woods. The woods were dominated by oak and hickory, and darkened here and there by an eastern hemlock. I spotted woodpeckers drumming on dead elms. At one of the widest places in my stream I flushed a duck. Being an upland boy, I had never seen waterfowl of any kind. Though only a mallard, I was thrilled at the iridescent green of its head and ran home to tell my mother.

During my high school years those Saturday-morning outings expanded to daylong expeditions. I packed lunch and hiked downstream as far as I could, my increasing endurance now a match for my unbounded curiosity. My stream grew in volume and its riffles gained some force. The water pooled up in places big enough for me to jump in. The stream and its valley were amazingly wild for being only forty miles from Pittsburgh.

Then one day I heard the incongruous rumble of truck noise ahead of me on my path. Approaching cautiously, afraid of what I would find, I saw that my wild stream tunneled into the darkness of a culvert beneath a four-lane highway. Then, with all its distance covered, with its own life of intimacy past, my little stream entered the Ohio River.

At that time the Ohio was the largest, barge-floating cesspool in America. In a few short feet my family water mixed and then disappeared into the oily flow of that eastern behemoth. The river had once been one of the biologically richest waterways in America, but industrial barging had overrun it for generations.

In one culminating instant I understood what a stream should be, and what it shouldn't. I sensed something tragic in raindrops and headwater rivulets that had flowed into the wrong river. This awareness came solely from what I saw in that meeting point. I wanted to capture it in a picture, but couldn't: I didn't own a camera.

The Ohio stretched a quarter mile across. Aging steel mills rusted alongside it; traffic pounded its banks; and railroad tracks cordoned off the water. Furthermore, it stank. What had once been the ultimate life force had become a conduit for waste--a hazard to public health.

The combined effect assaulted my senses completely, yet something even more troublesome was amiss. Dirty water, after all, could be cleaned up. Then I realized: it had no flow. It didn't move. Later I would learn that the Ohio is dammed twenty-six times in 981 miles, with scarcely a hundred yards of free-flowing river to be found in its entire length.

The Ohio showed me what could happen to streams when they became rivers. At the time, I took my stream's dammed and polluted out come simply as a lesson in the ways of the world. An accompanying sense of fatalism took me years to shed. What I saw of course doesn't happen to every stream, and even where it does, there's no reason it must stay that way forever. But these realizations would come later. At that moment, I had to walk back upstream--sensing the fate of my family's waters.

TIM PALMER is all award-winning author, photographer, and conservationist, devoted to the preservation of rivers. This essay is adapted from his book, Rivers of America, which is being published this month by Abrams, New York.

Where the river stops running

Natural History, Sept, 2006 by Tim Palmer

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