Naming Elements
by John DiTillo
What makes a creek a creek? Water, clearly: rushing past rocks or sliding over sand, making its way seaward, maybe just wide enough to jump across, maybe not. A creek is any flow smaller than a river, according to Home Ground, a guidebook of North American landscape terms edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. But this definition says nothing of the source.
Some of the most beguiling places I have set foot are small streams – a snowmelt canyon in the Tetons, a jade-blue waterfall above Jacmel on Haiti’s southern coast, a raindamp hollow in St. Patrick’s County Park. Only one has ever caused me to ask if it is a creek, though, and why or why not. And it flows less than a mile from the busy city street where I live.
It is hard to say when I first took note of the water running next to Angela Boulevard. Driving around the roundabout, I was usually on the lookout for things like strollers and Mack trucks to avoid. Riding my bike, my focus was on the gravel bar around the bend, where I would sit and watch the osprey. From the river, the trickle is hard not to miss, because two bridges there in quick succession draw your attention and make you choose between paddling for the V’s of the eddies or ending up among the cottonwoods that drifted into the piers at high water and stuck.
This place bore all the classic creek characteristics: flowing water, rocks, plants – that kind of thing. I knew where it met the river, but where it came from was a mystery. I was not aware of crossing it when I drove down Portage, or any other street for that matter. Maybe it veered north into the neighborhood. It bore no signs. No one I know knew its name.
So I began to wonder. What is this place? What was it like before the roads and buildings? Did the original peoples wade in it, hunting crayfish? What did the Potawatomi call this spot before the lines of Indiana were drawn? What do they call it now?
The waterfall where the stream meets the river looks and acts a lot like the ancient limestone cliffs of Missouri, where I grew up. Only up close can you see that they are sculpted amalgamate. Concrete. Upstream, the banks span some three-to-five feet for the distance of a soccer field or so, then broaden out to form a shallow pond. Above that, the waterway disappears into an eight-foot underground concrete pipe. Water runs perennially from this pipe – even during dry spells like this spring, which was the driest even the old-timers could recall – suggesting a groundwater spring somewhere in the underland.
Only up close, standing on the smooth sidewalk nearby, could I see that this place was absolutely full of life. Redwinged blackbirds make a mellifluous racket. Bees buzz about. Umpteen species of wildflowers vie for sun under white pine, river birch, sycamore, willow, and tulip trees. One day when I had some time, I sat and watched for a while. Dragonflies darted about like ecstatic acrobats. A large turtle, maybe a snapping turtle, bobbed at the surface then vanished under concentric circles. A mallard mother and her six ducklings dabbled at the far shore.
It seemed evident to my untrained eye that this area had undergone relatively recent restoration. The feeling that natural forces were at work here was also unmistakable. Those big rocks could be glacial erratics, who knows?
It is not on any map that I could find. A friend shared a digital copy of an 1863 map of South Bend. Where this stream is is blank. There is a squiggly line marked “Portage Creek” that flowed not far off, starting at a place called Kankakee Lake and meeting the St. Joseph River at what is now Keller Park. Neither the lake nor the creek now exists.
I dug a city street map of Elkhart, South Bend, and Goshen out of my roll-top desk. It shows nothing here. Then again, both Auten Ditch and Bowman Creek are little blue lines without names, and Juday Creek is spelled “Judy.”
According to the most famous internet map app, the watery patch next to Angela does not exist (try telling that to the snapper!). There is the park, there is the road, there is the industrial warehouse, but no creek. With the most spectacular GPS-location tool our glittering technological society has to offer in your hand, you can truly not know where you are in the world.
The lens of the watershed – the earthly arteries that define the surface of the planet – offers a different take. We are connected to the Atlantic Ocean because the Great Lakes flow into it via the St. Lawrence Seaway, and our river flows into Lake Michigan, and this little rivulet in question runs right into the river. You can shut your phone off, look around, and say, “Well I’m right here by this creek.”
It made sense to take clues from the place itself, the critters that live there. The mother mallard must be praised for her choice of a home, as each time I revisited she was still followed by all six of her ever-larger offspring. The turtle wouldn’t be there if there weren’t good things to eat. This is no ditch, no gutter. My field guide tells me the yarrow growing there is an “alien,” though it appears comely, neighborly, and right at home. The mullein in meteoric bloom and the modest daisy fleabane are wildflowers, lovely to me, but common in poor fields, roadsides, and “wastelands.”
No doubt a road runs past it. Anyone on foot cannot miss the grumble of engines, the cough of exhaust. The reeds and pond bottom are clogged with windblown trash, alas. Polluted, probably, but desolate moonscape it is not. Butterflies flutter amid the bright orange butterfly weed. Bumblebees go bonkers for the purple wild bergamot. The streamside thicket is thrumming with life and abloom with every color in the rainbow. Perhaps what is wasted is not the land but our own attention.
For years I only saw this stream in the corner of my eye. It was in the corner of my mind, if at all, as I went on my way somewhere else. Maybe its namelessness says something about our collective posture toward place, the ways in which we hold the landscape in our imagination, and how it holds us.
I wanted to know the stories that people had to tell about this place, about how and when we name water. Did brakemen in the 1900s on the old coal line railroad glimpse herons stalking the pond as their train chugged past, and did they daydream about a pole and a line? A little trickle among uncountable others may simply not have made the cut for the 1860s map. Maybe the mapmaker missed it, just like the mapmakers miss it today. The West Bank trail crosses the stream on a neat little bridge near the roundabout at Riverside, and I was chatting with friends at that very point some weeks back when they said they knew a fellow, an engineer who was the retired head of Public Works, and he might be able to shed some light on things.
So I sent him an email, and he very kindly wrote me back. The gist of his generous, detailed response was this: the area is indeed part of a Public Works project to divert stormwater runoff (thank goodness, lest it combine with sewage during heavy rains and overflow into the river, poisoning it). The original plan called for an underground culvert that people would neither see, nor care to (as he pointed out). The city asked the design team to try again, and they came up with what can be seen today: an attractive, biodiverse, dynamic, trapezoidal pond/creek waterway intended to mimic Mother Nature’s ways. The water flows all the time not because of some long-lost historical spring, as I had wrongly guessed, but because of river water pumped up to the pond and thence the “creek,” thanks to a high-efficiency low head pump installed at the time of construction.
After reading his message I had to just sit for a bit. It was as if somebody had lobbed a load of river rock into the placid puddle of my mind and sent the brain waves splashing this way and that. Certainly I felt glad – gratitude for the conversations and choices that resulted in such a fine place for a walk. I also felt duped.
That stuck with me for a week or two, until I found myself camping with my wife and two young children up in the Manistee National Forest. I lay awake under the Milky Way, and my thoughts drifted back to the not-creek creek. The sheepishness of knowing I’d been on a wild goose chase melted away and something less tangible and more permanent took its place.
True, it is a human-made place. But it is also made by something else. The pump brings water up; gravity brings it down. Humans didn’t invent gravity. People planted trees and flowers, but the plants couldn’t sow their seeds without the pollinators. In a couple of years it would be a wasteland indeed if all the flowers died. So the insects are also to thank. A creek, once buried in a culvert, is no longer a creek. And so the sky (which humans also did not make) is an integral aspect of creekness.
Even in a ten-foot concrete tube, flowing water is still in the process of changing, as the natural world always is. River bottoms shift, channels change course, dams are grinded out. In time – a thousand years, ten thousand – this place will no longer precisely resemble the idea of what it was made to be, because it is constantly remaking itself. Birds plant new trees. Tree roots break pavement. Floods wash land away. Wind wears rocks to sand, and sand flows to the sea.
To call the stream not a creek, then, is to make an assumption and an oversight. If we assume that humans are somehow apart from nature, then roofs and steeples and parking lots cannot be headwaters. Our limited life spans and attention spans make it hard to see flux in geologic time. This place – every place – is participating in processes beyond human manufacture: the hydrological cycle, the shifting tectonic plates, the growth and death and rebirth of galaxies.
Right now, less than a mile from my house, water is spilling over the little falls and becoming the river. There is no secret spring upstream. There is a pump made of metal, yet where did that metal come from: Mars? The pump must run on electricity, which if it is connected to the grid means it runs mostly on burning coal, which is to say burning bits of earth. If it runs on solar panels, then that is sun power, which brings us back to the sky again.
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Everything is connected to everything else.
Thus, we have a choice to make. We can be mindful of the more-than-human world in which we make our lives and try to work with it. Or we can work against it. Collaboration or interference. The engineers who helped bring the pond and stream into being alongside Angela Boulevard opted for the former, much to the benefit of the people who live here, the flora and fauna, and the river. Not to mention everybody downstream.
The email that changed my thinking about the stream also mentioned a rationale for doing the project the way they did. Before my time in town, there was a community-wide effort to articulate a shared vision, a kind of City Plan. Turns out, people want to live somewhere that is inviting and pleasant, not the opposite. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan explores the embodied experiences at the heart of this ancient human endeavor in a wonderful book called Space and Place. When humans work against nature, the result is often a desolate, dysfunctional sort of space: voids, vacancies, drive-through dead zones. When we work with the natural processes that make life possible, we cultivate a sense of place: fullness, vibrancy, interconnectedness, flourishing.
An underground culvert is a space. A pond pouring into a creek is a place.
If we are not too distracted by the devices of our own invention, if we are not too harried by human schemes beyond our personal control – bills, fads, wealth disparity, gun violence, strip mines, wars, the news – perhaps we can learn to notice the dynamics that create places that speak most to our souls and make us feel alive. Perhaps we can form a place in our imaginations where humans do not despoil the earth but rather honor and belong to it. Perhaps we can learn to live there.
Such was my lofty goal when I set out with muck boots, work gloves, and notebook to the mouth of the not-creek creek. I stole a page out of The River Why and aimed to trace the thing to its source. Along the way I’d gather garbage up into a large black trash bag and look for signs of life.
There was the sound of water falling on rock into river. I waded upstream in ankle-deep current, picking tattered plastic bags and bottles and wrappers and straws – so many straws – out of the reeds and driftwood sticks. I turned over a rock and saw it crawling with living things: sowbugs and flatworms. These benthic macroinvertebrates, a.k.a. “benthos,” are species of bottom-dwelling creatures who form the basis of aquatic food webs. Sowbugs are moderately intolerant of pollution, whereas flatworms can handle a little more funk.
I walked through the tunnel under the Riverside bridge just as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled over, was greeted on the other side by birdsong and toad leaps. A logjam of junk loomed, like a convenience store had shipwrecked upstream. I was sweating. From down in the verdant corridor of wildflowers, the road was audible but invisible – a world away. An electric blue damselfly blazed by. I picked up a shard of Styrofoam plate, saw it was now a home to benthos, put it back.
Boulder-hopping and squelching in the mud I went, up to the spillway of the pond, where the cascade provides enough oxygen for gilled snails to proliferate. I skirted the pond, bushwhacking in the brush, startling toads into the water with each step. Step, plop, step, plop. My bag was nearly full. At the top of the pond there is a deep, clear pool. Mama mallard eyed me. Discarded “natural” Fiji water bottles and sunken beer cans rotted. Inside the culvert it is cool; you can see your breath if you hike in far enough and bring a light. Even on a hot day. You can hear a trickle whispering in the distance in the darkness.
Back outside, heavy-bellied cumulus clouds promise rain.
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About the Author
John DiTillo works in the Jr. High at Good Shepherd Montessori School, where he leads students in service and citizen science on the St. Joseph River Watershed. You can often find him in his canoe with his wife and two young children. He turns 36 in October.
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