The Creek

Three geese scooted the creek then veered towards a mass of cattails. A coyote slipped into the tamarisk, reappeared upstream, then vanished. Deer prints tracked feeble smears of snow edging the ice. I came to the bridge just after dawn. Along the creek the forest was all faded yellows and shades of gray. 

I walked up from the Fountain trailing the ghost-whinny of a woodpecker. It moved ahead, elusive, always beyond my sight. The sky, a cold, indifferent blue, pushed to the rim of the mountains where gloomy clouds crowded the peaks and ridges. Ponds, frozen in Januarys past, held but thin, spherical lips of ice edging the shore and the base of cattails. A nuthatch called, a nasally wah-wah-wah. I stopped, but as with the woodpecker, I couldn’t locate the bird. 

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For several hours I moved north, pushing through the creekside forest. In the afternoon, I came to a cement barrier where an irrigation canal siphoned a significant portion of the creek’s flow. The water tumbled a rock ledge into a frothy pool. A blue heron stood where the flow eddied. Several Hooded mergansers bobbed in the froth alongside a plastic shopping bag, bits of blue plastic, and an old Gatorade bottle. A mallard shouted, rose and turned north. 

The heron, barely a body-length away just across the flow, focused on a school of pinky-sized silver chub and minnows crowding the pool. She waited, betraying nothing. Then, she stabbed, pulling two minnows into her beak. She gulped and returned to her statuesque hunting position. 

I plopped to the ground, opened my pack, and poured a cupful of coffee from my thermos. I added a generous splash of whisky, closed my eyes, pulled a deep breath and focused on the soothing chorus of the creek. 

There was a place along that section of Colorado’s Fountain Creek where a beaver constructed a dam. The structure grew at the confluence of the Fountain and a brook cascading from the forest. The beaver’s pond was long, skinny, deep, snaking from the dam through an elven copse of elms, willows, and sheltering cottonwoods. There, the aquatic rodent had cleared dozens of trees, creating a wide, open meadow filled with water, a rich, wetland ecosystem in the middle of the forest. 

I had seen Snowy egret fish the pond while teals and wood duck dabbled. I had counted Sora at the pond. Sora, Virginia rail, Sandpiper and, once, a White Ibis, a coastal bird from the southeast, rarely seen in the mountain west. One summer afternoon, I’d sat at the edge of the pond breathing the rich, wet scents. Duckweed blanketed the surface, turning the forest to a glowing green. The beaver surfaced, a yard distant, her head crowned in a ring of duckweed. Another day, a mid-winter one, the beaver had pushed through a film of ice and again studied me over, eyes and nose just breaking the surface. She watched me for what felt like a century, then slipped beneath the black waters. 

The beaver dam and pond were my goal that day. 

“Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River”

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At some point, the path led through a collapse of elms. The trees had been toppled by an unprecedented windstorm that battered the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains six weeks previously. Meteorologists described the blow as “ludicrous” for its intensity. Climate change-driven temperature differences between the poles and the equator had forced the jet stream more southerly. The peaks increased the high-altitude turbulence and the wind crashed into the foothills and prairies of eastern Colorado with hurricane-force winds, throwing countless trees to the ground and driving a grass-fed wildfire that burned through communities northwest of Denver. Nearly two-thousand homes turned to ash in less than an hour. 

I crawled over and under the downed trees, leaves, and dry grasses rustling and crunching under my boots. West, across the creek, the blinking billboard of a hotel flashed in the gloam. The hotel stood next to the crowded Interstate 25, a massive north-south highway running the length of Colorado’s Front Range. A whale-like military aircraft banked, then cut east. A shopping cart lay in the mud, collecting trash from upstream: plastic bags, plastic water bottles, bits of clothing and a diaper. Mallards flushed from the bank. Two Kingfishers raced for a willow. The sky darkened and a perfume of snow fringed the wind. I shivered. 

The path I followed runs for several miles along Fountain Creek just south of the city of Colorado Springs.

We call the Fountain a “creek” because once upon a time it actually was a creek; a thirsty, ephemeral waterway, tributary to the Arkansas River, prone to occasional dramatic floods. Today, the Fountain runs full and swift the entire year.

The Fountain trickles from snows blanketing the slopes of the 14,115-foot high mountain most Americans know as Pikes Peak. The original people of the region, the Tabeguache Ute — Nuuchiu in their own language — know the peak as Tavá Kaa-vi, “Sun Mountain” and the waters birthed from Tavá flow seventy-four and a half miles to its confluence with the Arkansas River at 4,695 feet in my hometown of Pueblo, Colorado. 

Tavá Kaa-vi has many names in many languages…Nuuchiu, Hinono’eino, Ka’igwu, Numunuu, Tin-ne-ah, English, French, Spanish…and there is some controversy as to how we should refer to the massive pile of pinkish granite. To me, it’s just The Peak.  

In middle school, I biked with my friend Scott Grant to the creek.  We rode through a shadowed cottonwood gallery — populated, so we had been told, with drug dealers and Satan worshippers — to the creek’s edge, where we sought arrowheads in the shifting, pink sands of the dry bed. In high school, another friend, Dave Atencio, and I fished from a bridge at the confluence. We sipped at cans of Coors pulled from an ice-filled Styrofoam cooler we’d liberated from his father’s garage. Nearly frozen was the only way I could stomach Coors. It was true then, it is even more true today. Atencio and I took mostly trout and some bass, then scrambled down to the sandbar east of the bridge to build a fire, cook, eat and make up stories about things that hadn’t happened to us yet. We drank well into the night. In the fall, we hunted, illegally, for pheasant and quail in the sloughs and river bottom forests north of the city. In the winter, Atencio and I returned, exploring the artless red sands for bank-side Pleistocene reliquaries, the sediments iced and prickly on our bare, digging fingers.

Scott is dead. A bullet took his head apart while at a party in high school. Cleaning the mess is something I will never forget. Atencio is also dead. He, at least, made it into his early forties before a heart attack took him after a softball game. For me, the Fountain carries ghosts. 

Fountain Creek is one of the most human-dominated water systems in the American West – and that’s saying something. 

Over the years, the Fountain has been dammed, diverted, poisoned, re-routed, mapped, named, channelized, filled with physical and human debris, reduced, augmented, confused, litigated, studied, stolen, replaced, piped, known, unknown, forgotten, remembered, misunderstood, blamed, monitored, sampled, screened, broken and very nearly tamed. More than anything else, humans have altered the very nature of the Fountain, pumping water from Colorado’s western slope into the Fountain’s watershed, making what was once an occasional creek into a full-time river. Given the number of “real” rivers drying up across the American West, the creation of a “new” river is more than a bit mind-bending. 

West, the storm tumbled down the mountains, draping the blue in a turbulent gray. At the edge of the ridge, you could see that it was snowing. The temperature plummeted. The wind kicked up. The song of the blow in the treetops swirled with that of the waters rushing over the gravels in the creek. Soon I could not distinguish one from the other. 

I counted fifteen crows huddled in a cottonwood, clicking, rattling and croaking. I imagined them discussing the impending storm. I followed a hole through a crowd of willows back to the water, passing over ancient sediments held in place by the roots of trees and grasses and onto the shifting deposits bordering the creek. 

The alluvial sands of the Fountain are varying shades of pink, red and orange. They are tracked in prints of heron, geese, ducks, fox, coyote, skunk, porcupine, beaver, deer, squirrels and the occasional elk, bear and mountain lion. And, of course, people. Nearly a million people live within the Fountain watershed. When the creek rises, it washes the sediments free of prints. When the flow drops, tracks reappear within hours. With each step, I added my prints to the ephemeral tapestry of life along the creek. 

But the beaver’s dam was gone. The pond drained. The aquatic rodent that had eyed me the previous summer was nowhere to be found. The dam, the pond, the beaver, they had all been there just one month earlier. There hadn’t been enough moisture for a flood to wash the dam away. Even more confusing, logs from the dam were scattered upstream along the gravels, some of the larger chunks of wood resting twenty to thirty feet from where the dam had been. I circled back through the willows to what had been the top of the pond, scouring the area for evidence. 

Without the dam, the wetland drained. Only pools remained, the briefly stilled waters glistened under the gray. The brook bubbled, rippling the surface, stirring tufts of bent, yellow grasses, while the moss covered rocks shone neon-green against the black and yellow canvas.  

I made my way back to where the dam had been, completing a circle. On the gravel beach, the light had shifted. In the sand, among the prints of geese, coyotes, and anglers I made out the faint track of a machine, a tracked Bobcat or, perhaps, a Kubota excavator. The beaver dam had been deliberately dismantled, the pond purposefully drained, the beaver possibly killed or, at best, driven off. 

There had been no reason, at least none that I could see, for tearing the dam apart. It hadn’t threatened any road, trail, farm, building or other human prize. It had simply been there, filtering sediments and pollutants, slowing the flow, replenishing the aquifer and hosting a diverse ecosystem. 

I kicked at the tracks in the sand.

If there’s a specific word that describes a special place in nature harmed or violated by human beings, I haven’t found it. “Desecration” comes close, but doesn’t quite fit. If there isn’t such a word, there ought to be, for it is an all too common occurrence. The fact that there may not be a word for such a thing suggests we accept such violations as normal. 

I sat again, poured more coffee, splashed in the whiskey, and watched snow tumble to the water. The oversized flakes were puffy and light. Across the Fountain, a man finished a fresh wooden fence. He had set the posts in concrete and shoveled sands and gravels across the cement to protect it from the coming freeze. Behind the man, I-25 roared, packed with rush hour commuters. Another military transport circled overhead. A helicopter, another plane, a quad drone, then sirens. 

I tell myself, or more accurately, I try to teach myself not to collapse into anger and despair with every slight to the land and waters. They are too many, too often and if you take it all to heart – which I tend to – functioning in this age of this world becomes impossible. 

I pushed myself out of the sand and gathered the logs, branches, and sticks that had once made up the beaver’s dam. Some were the size of my leg and heavy. Most were forearm-sized. I carried these in bundles. I piled the wood next to the creek, tore off my gloves and coat, rolled up my sleeves, and set about rebuilding the dam. 

First, I forced a dozen or more smaller sticks vertically into the bed of the brook. The water filled my boots and soaked my pants. My feet numbed. Next, I cut willow with a knife my son had given me for Christmas and wove the branches through the vertical supports. I placed the larger logs horizontally behind the structure and packed it all with mud. 

As with so much in life, I knew full well this was a useless gesture. I was acting out, trying to make myself feel better, as if by taking some sort of action, I might yet have influence. I could never construct a dam as well as a beaver. My dam would conform in no way to what the beaver or the creek wanted or needed. My dam, I knew, wouldn’t survive the first of the heavy spring flows in the brook, and anyway, the creek will win out, I told myself. It always has and it always will. Water always wins. The Fountain will remain. A beaver will build a fresh structure. An egret will fish among the duckweed. A rust-colored coyote will prowl the woods. The creek will survive. The river knows what it knows. The story does not end. The story never ends. 

But what of my children? My grandchildren? What about you? What about me? My existence in this world had felt like I was a man, hands chained behind his back, working to untangle a knotted ball of yarns, strings, cables, ropes, cords, and threads. Life in the age of climate change – fatherhood in the age of climate change – confounded and, far too frequently, depressed me.  More often than not, I felt as if I was simply faking my way through an existence that doesn’t quite work for me – and I just don’t understand what to do about it all. I scramble for purchase. I scramble for purpose. Many days I feel as if I’d lost faith in where I was headed.

This book then, is an imperfect, unsatisfying attempt at finding the truth of something. Not all the truth and certainly not the truth of everything. But a truth about something. This book is the story of how we’ve learned everything there is to know about a creek and how we’ve learned so little about ourselves. This collection of stories, experiences, and interviews aims to bear witness, to grieve, to offer gratitude, and to uncover something essential about this moment, about us as a people, the Fountain, and the future of water in the American West. 

By the time the snow arrived, I had a dam that slowed and pooled water while not halting the flow. The water backed up, the pond grew. It was nearly dark and the wind shifted, driving the snow horizontal into my face, stinging in a thousand unique pricks. I was soaked, sweating, and caked in mud. The temperature plummeted and a deep shiver took hold, the kind of relentless shuddering that tells you, you might soon be in a whole heap of trouble. I was worried that my wife, Rasa, might be worried about me.  

I pulled on my coat and gloves. I finished the whiskey, took up my pack, hopped the brook, and scrambled up the embankment. 

A great V of geese passed overhead, pushing up the Fountain, into the storm. 

Jim O’Donnell was born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado. A fifth-generation Coloradan, O’Donnell worked many years as an archaeologist before focusing on public lands protection and watershed restoration. He is the father of three children and lives in Taos, New Mexico, with his wife, Rasa. He is the author of numerous short works of fiction, countless journalistic articles and the nonfiction work “Notes for the Aurora Society: 1500 miles on Foot Across Finland.” Learn more at: www.aroundtheworldineightyyears.com

Type of Story: Review

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