The Creek

One of the (many) things I love about the Twelve Acre Woods is the little creek at the southern end. It’s not big, but it always has water in it. After heavy rains, it floods, sometimes significantly. I find evidence of flooding eight or ten feet above the stream channel on occasion. I’ve never witnessed these major flood events but I’ve found debris hanging in trees well above where it should be. Most of the time, though, it’s a peaceful little creek that babbles its way through the county, passing through our little kingdom on its way to the Mississippi River. My boys like to go down there to fish, and I’ve been known to practice my fly casting technique a few times as well. Fish aren’t big, but they bite – bluegill, smallmouth bass, even a catfish here and there. The Wonder Beagles always enjoy a creekside wander as well. There are so many new smells for them to experience.

On one side of the creek, there is a sandbar, where we often find deer, raccoon, and coyote tracks. The other side has a gravelly bank, and we enjoy looking for nice, flat rocks and have rock skipping contests. A day or two after a heavy rain is a good time for rock skipping: the storm usually drops off a fresh supply of flat stones for us. What’s interesting to me is not just the skipping stone resupply, but how quickly the details of my creek’s channel can change overall. Sometimes the changes are subtle – the wildlife tracks get washed away, or a little riffle is a bit wider and deeper. Other times the changes are very noticeable. At one time, sand had accumulated in the inside of a bend of the channel, and washed out a portion of the outside, creating a drop-off in the middle of the creek bed into fairly deep pool. There were decent sized fish holed up there the first summer we lived here. At some point, however, changing currents have smoothed things out a bit, and while it’s still a bit deeper towards the outside of the bend, the gradient is much less dramatic. And the fish have moved on.

Once, a few days after a heavy storm, I wandered down to the creek and found a large uprooted oak tree wedged across the creek between the opposite banks, a meter or so above the water. It hadn’t been there before, and seemed to be lodged in there pretty solidly. We could climb up and sit on it – it didn’t budge at all. It was there for a season or so. But then we had another big rain, and the tree bridge disappeared. I had no idea how far it floated down the storm-swollen creek before landing in the Twelve Acres, and no idea where it ended up. It may be in the Gulf of Mexico by now.

Things change in the Twelve Acre Woods – the world continues to adapt to its own situation, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the creek channel. Details of its configuration change every day – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Parts of the channel get obstructed by sand or fallen trees – no matter: it carves a new path and carries on. The course continually changes, responding to storms, droughts, vegetation. Today’s path is different from yesterday’s, yet it still manages to get where it’s meant to go.