Place Blog #3: Lost Creek, Finding Answers

Here, in a quick zig-zag through a hollow, Lost Creek, still locked in ice, bounces between two thrusts of ridge. Driving over the last bridge before the creek empties into the Juniata River, though, I see that cracks have formed from the thawing and refreezing we have had in the past week. Shelves of ice thrust up over others. Water seeps from these fault lines, running like a shallow fountain over the surface of the ice.  A meandering channel cuts a temporary path through this water rock along the far end of a curving bank.

Standing back by the road, I feel this—this slow loosening of winter, this exhale—is not really melting, but erosion. The creek really has been never still. Always, even where frozen from bank to bank, the water is moving—underneath, unseen. Melting implies that the ice itself gives up, releases itself into liquid. But a frozen body of moving water breaks up, thins out, cracks because of the never ceasing friction from below.

From the cut away hillsides, I know that creeks are change exemplified. I often see in creeks their fluidity, their constancy in adaptability. I don’t remember where I first heard the adage “you never stand in the same river twice,” but I’ve always felt—no matter how the channel has been cut differently, what fallen trees have dammed up this or that pool—I’m still standing the river, which essentially is the same.

Yet, I now realize I have been lost in the illusion of water. It is never the same river. Even when seemingly solid, erosion is part of the make-up of moving water. Dirt is an essential element. I see millennia traced in the rock cuts towering above the stream.

But the change is not always so slow.

I have found that Lost Creek originally got its name because an earlier settler thought the creek got “lost.” While traveling south-southwest toward the Juniata, it abruptly banked north, entering the main river upstream. If this is true, since that time, the creek has taken the mounds of earth that it has stripped away from the hills of this valley and silted in its delta because it now flows south into the Juniata. That was only about two-hundred years ago, very short in terms of geology and hydrology.

And the character of this stream changes weekly. It could be this week, or next, that it flows freely, raked clean of ice by the current. High water will gouge out new undercut banks for trout to hide in. Fish will be planted by trucks and buckets, then to be harvested by overambitious anglers that always kill their catch. Life will come and go—in a season, in an instant.

I feel a change upon me, too. I don’t know what it is, but I feel the claw of current tearing at icy thoughts, feelings. My channel being cut. Dirt in my veins. I have found: why a Lost Creek? Definitions are lost, obscured in ice and mud and wandering streams and silted in history. This is liberation, even though there is still ice.