When our streams go forgotten

During the past week what little snow there was around Iowa City melted away. It was another light winter, which made for easy driving and a little less strain on our backs from sidewalk shoveling. Until the spring rains arrive, the proverbial jury is out on whether too little snow will mean drought this summer.

But we did lose something thanks to the dry winter: the fast, wonderful rise of our creeks as cold meltwater flows into them.

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Those of us fortunate enough to live near a creek when growing up discovered it one spring day during grade school. We'd always known it was there, had heard our parents talk of it. Maybe during summer while aboard a combine with our father, we'd glimpse the distant, blue sash that ribboned ever onward through the amber corn.

Eventually we reached an age when our parents let us amble alone into the fields or parks and explore. One such warm, April weekend I followed an amazing stream of cottony down that parachuted in windrows across the sky, leading me to my farm's waterway. The down sailed from a cottonwood that clutched the creek's high bank, and I sat beneath the tree, pretending snow was falling.

As the days grew longer and increasingly warm, I returned, listening to the lark's repeated song of lyrical five notes as watching the stream drawl southward.

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By summer, we found the creek an extraordinary place to escape the open yard's constant wind. Sometimes we'd bring a book and read under the cottonwood. Other times we'd toss sticks into the creek, examining them as they moistened, rocked, then overturned while the poplar leaves upon the opposite bank flashed and dazzled and above me the cottonwood leaves danced.

As the sun slowly arced overhead, we watched the trout swimming in the stream, listened to the frogs croak from their muddy crevices, poked at the turtles curling into their shells, squished the stream's sandy bottom between our toes. We grew to understand the cottonwood, the fresh water and the caddis fly skimming its surface like a child knew the warm embrace of his parents. Thanks to winter's forced absence, from year-to-year we saw all the creeks' strange and wondrous changes, like how its course veered a little to the east and how the cottonwood rose a couple of feet.

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The creeks of today are not the ones with which we grew up.

Today, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources warns us to eat only so many fish from various streams. Stinking green muck fills many creeks by late August as high phosphorous runoff encourages algae blooms. We must be careful at even the clearest of streams as they flow into ponds and lakes that routinely test positive for E. coli and fecal coliform bacteria.

Though there are 70,000 miles of streams in Iowa, few of us rely upon them anymore. We use water treatment plants and deep wells to provide our water. Our streams remain hidden beyond the roll of a cornfield or an apartment building.

But that doesn't mean we don't need them.

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When autumn arrived, we'd bid farewell to our imaginary friends - the trout, the frogs, the wild walnut trees, the turtles - and gaze sadly as the water rippled onward, fallen leaves flitting downstream upon its surface, to a wide, shallow bottomed river that we'd never seen for it was far away.

Then, one October as our feet crunched through the dry grass, the branches bare and silhouetted in the distant, setting sun, we looked hard at our refuge. Next spring, our parents said, we'd have to start helping around on the farm, get a summer job. A cold wind slapped our body, and we sensed it might be the last day of Indian summer, that there would be no more going to the creek.

We paused for a moment, took in a deep breath and watched the clouds purple above the orange sun. We plucked a stem, scraped off its head between our fingers. Finally, we tossed it down and walked languidly back to the house.

(originally published March 7, 2004 as "What we lose when our state's streams go forgotten")