Place entry #5

So yes, this and the last prompt entry are being submitted just after midnight on March 7th. The delay comes from two equally unsound and indefensible reasons: waiting for rain and solitary binge drinking. The latter is self-evidently inexcusable, so let's discuss the former.

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry that featured the outflow points where the city's storm drain and sewage system overflow combine to dump into the creek during "rain events." In case the dangers inherent in that statement with regards to water quality are not apparent, please reference the below sign (taken where Nine Mile Run exits its underground tunnel - a post for a later date):

And it doesn't photograph well, either.

So, about the rain. I had read that even 1/10th of an inch of rain can cause those overflow points to expel untreated human waste into the creek, so I have been keeping an eye on weather reports to anticipate when I could see one of the so-called "fecal fountains." (please see Place Entry #3 for an explanation). Well, this past Friday saw the rains start in the afternoon, and they continued on into Saturday evening. When I noticed that the rains would have reached a point that would have stressed the city's storm drains and caused a sewage overflow into NMR, I was excited, but I was also too drunk to do anything about it (please reference the above note on binge drinking). So Friday, the prime fecal fountain spotting window, was a bust. I had to wait until I sobered up enough on Saturday to drive down and take a walk to survey the damage to the stream. It was still raining, thankfully - or for that matter, unthankfully, because the stream was a frightful mess. Donning my much-ridiculed duster and Stetson, I decided to see just how bad a full night of rain actually looked.

Above: walking punchline/park flasher/anybody want to buy a watch?

Where can I begin? The sheer amount of litter that had accumulated in the week or so since I'd been there last (an inebriated 4am excursion that thankfully retains no incriminating photographic evidence) was nauseating. I tried to take some photos to give a sense of how much had washed up on the stream banks, but i just couldn't get a good angle to show a decent representation. It looked as though the city garbage trucks had just upturned somewhere upstream, pouring plastic bottles and microwave dinner boxes down the creek. One good night of rain, and the whole above-ground stretch starts to look like a municipal dump. Sickening. Swollen with waste water, clouded, turbulent, throwing off empty bottles and half-eaten food bits - maybe the creek and I had more in common this morning than I had realized.

People tend to forget that John C. Reilly was in "The River Wild." I'm just saying.

So now I know what I have to do on my Spring Break - I need to do some clean-up. Of myself, of my affairs, of the banks of NMR. There it is - the little creek that I'd come to care about, the natural stretch of water that just kept flowing despite the industrial waste, the garbage, the pollutants - there it is, and it looks like hell after what is just another natural event in the life of a river. Rain. Sure, rain should swell the banks, make everything muddy, maybe knock a tree or two loose on the banks, but not this. The waters surged enough to drown out the sounds of traffic from the highway nearby, and the birdsong I loved so much last time was still around, though a little less so this day. The banks were muddy - everything was muddy. Everything was wet and heavy it was wonderful to see. I say wonderful because I know that the Spring blooms are coming and the rains are presages of the coming flowers and leaves. Slopping in the mud is a natural part of being around a stream in the rain, but watching Colt .45 cans drift past you just simply is not. 

(near the entrance to the NMR underground tunnel - just another storm drain outflow, washing who-knows-what into NMR)

But it's nearly Spring. There's promise in the rains - promise of the coming blooms, the new leaves, the wash of greenery that is only weeks away. And there's promise in this creek, even if it keeps getting crowded with garbage. There's always promise in the creek. Slag heaps, toxic waste, struggling flora - they change, they can get better. There's always a promise to be made to the creek, too. It perseveres because it must, because that is its nature. It flows by the divine writ of gravity and the mystique of the water cycle. It promises the habitat to grow life, micro and macro, leafy and feathered, green and many-colored. It provides out of no will or conscious agency, out of only unthinking necessity, but we deny it by sloth, by ignorance, by incompetence and uncaring. It is not a solution to our excesses, and we owe it what we owe all waterways: the promise to understand that they carry more than simply water, that they carry more than their weight in our inland world. The least we can do is promise to respect that.