Prompt Blog #6: There’s a trout stream in PA

I propose that we make a new license plate here in Pennsylvania. I can imagine it now. There, on the plates of the cars that pull off Rt. 35 before me, heading north with me on Jericho Road. Across the top it’ll read “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania”; at the bottom it could read the name of the stream that serves as the rock of that fly fisher’s faith. “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania: Pine Creek.” “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania: Penn’s Creek.” “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania: The Little ‘J.’” Maybe Trout Unlimited could even incorporate this saying into the plate that they already produce in conjunction with PennDot. That way the extra money anglers are paying to evangelize their sport and their holy shrines will go to an organization that will help preserve the land and the water that they share in communion with others.

I know that there’ll be more than enough interest in such a venture. I’ve talked to numerous fishermen who describe, in detail, their altar stream and invite me to fish those waters as freely as my grandpa invited any stranger to church. These fishermen can, of course, recite the names of pools and swifts better than they can recite even one Bible verse, and they are only inviting me to fish with them so they feel less guilty about praying for a rise instead of kneeling to pray on Sunday. They need partners in crime. These fisher-types would be glad to personalize and purchase a license plate that would boast of the glories of their trout stream. Then, when they’re gathered around the tailgate, beer in hand, they can talk about how their waters are superior to the Henry’s Forks and Big Horn Rivers of the West—that theirs is the one and only, true trout stream. They’ll have the proof right there on their bumper and in their creels.

As I think about it, though, many fly fishermen whom I know (and whom I fall into ranks with on some issues) would discount the value of buying these license plates—and for many different reasons. Some would just say that fishing is just fishing and wouldn’t agree with my associating fly fishing with religion. Others may claim this license plate scam is just more evidence of how commercially trendy it has become to be a fisher of flies since that movie with Brad Pitt came out. But most of the people I fly fish with wouldn’t buy a plate with their favorite stream on it because they don’t want to blow the whistle on their whole operation. They (as well as myself) don’t want anyone else eavesdropping on their creek-side meditations. To some of us, the connection with our fish and our God is a personal one—a private, individual relationship, where God whispered into our ear where the fish are! We’ll fish the bigger waters—the Delawares, the Lehighs, the Clarion Rivers, etc.—but only when we don’t have the time to make it to our favorite streams. Those bigger streams are very nice cathedrals with wonderful gospels written about them that attract the devout and the faithful. But on them, it feels as if you’re only going through the motions, as if you’re not having a genuine experience.

I haven’t been to my trout stream in a while. I haven’t even thought about its currents in over a year. But as I cross over Lost Creek on an open-grate bridge in Jericho Mills, its currents remind of the quintessential trout stream—the stream that’s there in Pennsylvania for me, and I am transported to its banks.

It is the kind of pilgrimage that only a few people take. I’m looking for some obscure splinter of wood that’s supposedly a part of the Crucifix and is displayed on an altar in South America. You can’t locate it on the Internet or read about it in books; the only way you’ll ever find it is by talking with the locals.

Along the way, you’ve got to shuck pretension and ritualism like a nymphal skin. You’ve got to feel the grass in an oaken grove with your hands or bare feet. Splash the water on your face; put the rod down for a while. You’re only about an hour and 45 minutes from the intersection of Jericho Road and Rt. 35, somewhere in that vast north you spy on your commute home everyday. There’s a dirt road leading back to an old stone and timber bridge where you park since it’s too old and narrow to cross. The only sign of civilization is an abandoned camp made out of the same stone as the bridge. Down below there’s a series of runs and holes that hold decent trout, but you decide to wade slowly into the flatwater right in front of you. It’s not winter now; it’s that time of year, and you know the sulfur duns will pop up through the surface tension of the water. Anyway, you know there are some big trout in here, so there’s no reason to go tramping all over the countryside. The sun is starting to sink below the ridge that rises immediately due west, and you know you won’t have a lot of time before you can’t see your imitation on the water. This means you might not catch a fish, but—man!—it is just enough to be in a setting like this.

And that’s just it—you know. From faith or experience or whatever you want to call it—you know that stream so intimately that you have names of fish you caught on the back of your pictures. That place is so much a part of you that you might want to slap it on a license plate. Then again, you might not.

Place Blog #6: Not quite lost.

Sometimes, things aren’t “lost” but simply overlooked. In our haste, we rush around, looking for what we assume to be big and flashy and to jump out at us with blinking lights and signs saying “HERE: THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR!” But often, we miss whatever it is we’re looking for simply by oversight: the “lost” keys in your old jacket pocket, the “lost” wallet in your dresser drawer, the “lost” drive in your life…well I guess that’s what I’m looking for.

But for me, it took a slow meandering drive through the Lost Creek watershed, with my daughter in her booster seat in the back of our Jeep, for me to find some semblance of what I’m looking for. Throughout this process of discovering Lost Creek, with the idea of finding a home, I’ve tramped up and down the watershed—mostly alone, mostly in the cold. But today it was so nice out, I brought Clara along, hoping that we could find some place to walk along the creek, skip stones (or just throw them in as she does at only 3 and a ½ years old).

From our house, we only needed to wiggle around some back-country roads for a mile before we crossed a small bridge on Sunset Road with a culvert channeling Lost Creek underneath it. There we pulled over beyond the guard rail where enough road gravel made the muddy ground a little more stable. If driving fast enough on this road, you might not even notice the creek. It’s barely more than a trickle, and its banks are choked with tangling green briar, grape vine, scrub oak, and a plethora of other low-lying shrubbery. But, I know what I’m looking for, the knot of vegetation a sign, however slight, that something more might be beneath.

We got out of the car and walked up to where the water spills out of the culvert, the only place that has some briar removed enough to walk up to the edge of the creek. Above the bridge and a few yards below this spot, the creek is no more than six feet across and probably only shin-deep at best, even now a week after a major flood event. But right below the bridge, the channeling of the waters through the culvert has dug out a plunge pool, deep enough and dark enough to hold trout beneath the ice in winter and to provide enough cover from predatory birds in the low-water summer.

“Daddy, I want to fish,” Clara declared.

Be still me heart! My daughter: a fishing nut with the same cracked shell as me. In my mind, I quickly thought about what gear we had in the car: her Disney Princess rod, left over from a sunny pond fishing trip last fall, my fly chest- and back-packs, but no fly rod. With our lack of equipment and the sun really starting to fade behind Shade Mountain to our north and west, I tried to persuade her that we ought to go home, that we’d come back another day and fish.

“No,” she said in a sweet, not demanding way, “We can fish for a little bit. It’s not too dark.”

I couldn’t say no to her enthusiasm and persistence, so I got out her rod. I attached a bobber and below that, since we didn’t have any worms for her to use, attached two weighted wet-flies that I normally would use to nymph this time of year. We walked over to the edge of the creek. A scraggly pod of briar still clung to the bank here, but I could cast out over that for Clara, and then she would reel it back in after letting it drift for a few yards. This lasted for a few casts before she was picking up road gravel that was kicked under the guard rail toward the bank and was putting handfuls of this stone in my jeans pocket.

“Ready to go home?” I asked.

“No, you keep fishing daddy.”

So there I stood, in the fading light, pink Princess rod in hand (oh yeah…did I mention that the handle lit up when you pushed the button on the reel to open the bale…) and a pre-schooler filling up my pockets with rocks. I wonder what the few cars that drove back Sunset Road were thinking when they saw our motley operation.

But honestly, I didn’t care. It was here, in the waning glow of the first really nice spring evening, my daughter with me by the bank of this artificial hole dug out by the culvert currents, that I think I might have found at least a piece of what I was overlooking. It wasn’t about a creek. As much as moving water is part of me, the creek was only part of “it.” A landscape alone cannot be a home; it has to be filled with people. It has to be shared with those you love.

So as I reeled in the Princess rod for the last time, the sunlight nearly gone, Clara asked, “Do we have to leave yet…,” and pulled her rocks out of my pockets to toss in the creek. They made a blast of tiny splashes, that we could only hear, not see, and she laughed: “I want to do some more.” Pure, simple.

Here was…is…this little girl. I’ve always told my wife that Clara is something special to me, not only because she’s my first child, but because she’s the first blood relative I’ve ever known due to fact that I was adopted. It blew my mind that very first time I held her up and sang “Blackbird” to her in the hospital, and it blew my mind now because I know that there’s more than my blood coursing through her; the same river that moves through me moves through her.

Prompt Blog #5: PA’s Marcellus Shale Policy: FUBAR

I wracked my brain all week to decide what I wanted to blog about for this week’s prompt. There are so many issues that are close to my heart because they’re close to my home. I thought about writing about the siltation problem on the Susquehanna because of the lack of a riparian zone in the mostly agricultural landscape of Central Pa. I thought that I could write about the thermal pollution in the lower Susquehanna, caused by the reissuing of “cooling” water from power plants, which causes some areas of the lower river to reach summer time temperatures into the 100’s. Then there was the vanishing smallmouth bass population on the Susquehanna, which no one can explain except with vague generalities!

But then, I realized that you can’t really “rant” on any environmental issue in PA right now if you don’t rail upon the Marcellus Shale fracking boom that is currently going on in the state. For those of you who are not in the know, a large geologic formation called the Marcellus Shale lies underneath West Virginia Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.  Scientists and drillers have known for decades that the shale has held natural gas, but it used to be thought of little economic value because traditional drilling techniques only yielded modest production (however, those older wells are still producing without much decline in production, so “A patient investor might make a profit from these low yield wells with slowly declining production rates”) (Geology.com).

As most of us know, though, industry has little to no time for patience (or sustainability). So when Terry Englander, a geoscience professor at Pennsylvania State University, and Gary Lash, a geology professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, found that you could extract a lot more gas in a much shorter time with hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling (new techniques used in Texas to extract natural gas from the Barnett Shale), then the industry pounced on the area like a hungry cat on a mouse (Geology.com).

It is estimated that this formation holds 500 trillion square feet of natural gas (Savethewatertable.com). This kind of production would supply the whole East Coast with enough natural gas for…wait for it…if you can believe it…I’m not making this up: 50 years (Buffalonews.com)! While that seems like a long time, it’s a geologic blink of the eye, and when one considers the potential environmental costs, it’s not worth a dime!

Hydraulic fracking is not all it’s cracked up to be. In the process, “millions of gallons of water brewed with toxic chemicals,” and sand is forced into the well to “frack” the shale, releasing the gas (Buffalonews.com).  This in and of itself is not that bad, considering that the well is lined and sealed with concrete and used fracking water is supposed to be recycled, reused, or refined before being placed back in watersheds.

That would be the ideal situation. But when you consider that with PA’s current economic crisis (8 years of budget dispute included), the Department of Environmental Protection has seen a vast reduction in funding and personnel, so there is less oversight and applications for wells are passing without sufficient review. Consequently, oil and gas companies (from your small, local mom-and-pops to the big boys like Shell and Mobile) have a free ticket to drill for maximum profit.

Maximum profit means minimal environmental protections. First of all, these fracking operations are on the Allegheny Plateau and are drawing water from the headwaters of many streams and rivers that originate up in the mountains. This depletes the flow below and warms the waters, causing stress on aquatic wildlife. Furthermore, fracking water cannot be used indefinitely, and local water treatment plants don’t have the means or the capacity to treat toxic water, so these companies use “holding wells” to store this infected waste. Failure of these wells, spills, blowouts, or seepage through cracks in the seals of the gas wells can let this water into the local ground water, polluting residents’ drinking water. In Colorado, another state that has allowed hydraulic fracting, many have complained that the drilling waste has spoiled their drinking water (Savethewatertable.com).

It has even happened in PA. In Dimock, PA, many personal wells have been contaminated by methane leaking into the ground, and a spill into a local wetland led to a fish kill in the stream further down in the watershed (Buffalonews.com). There also was a blow-out in the central Northern Tier of PA and thousands of gallons of polluted water dumped into the ground (Savethewatertable.com).

So how has this happened? Don’t we have the Clean Water Act? Don’t we have a collective conscience or at least enough knowledge of history to remember the last 100 years where we had allowed the coal industry to run wild and now we’re still cleaning up their Acid Mine Drainage mess?

I guess not. Because we are the only state to have allowed the oil and gas companies free reign to destroy our landscape. In New York, there is a moratorium in place and no new gas wells can be drilled using the fracking technique until either more strict safeguards are in place or a better method is found to extract the gas. West Virginia has allowed drilling but oversees it closely; consequently, only a few hundred wells have been drilled (Buffalonews.com). In PA? 1,500 wells have already been drilled and 3,500 more permits are currently being processed (Savethewatertable.com).

Why do we allow this to happen? Greed. Individually, people who have property over the shale want to get rich quick by leasing their land to the drilling companies and earn royalties for the years to come. It has been a depressed area for many years. And the industry capitalizes on that. As one Washington D.C.-based industry economist said, “Before you put something in place that could dramatically affect this opportunity, think about the poor folks up there."

Listen to the rhetoric: “poor folks.” I barf at that paternalism. Having lived in Lock Haven, PA for 7 years, I was never a “poor folk,” even if money was tough. And I never would consider prostituting out the land just so that I could have it a little bit better. But others don’t care as much, and the industry won’t impose self-regulatory policies because “it believes state oversight is sufficient and worries the new EPA study will lead to new and costly safety and environmental rules that would rob them of decades of profit” (Buffalonews.com). Those rules may cost the industry money, but not having them will cost us generations of clean up.

Yet, no one seems willing to do anything about it. Republican Governor Tom Corbett wants to open up more state lands for drilling, yet he won’t impose a severance tax on gas extraction to help pay for clean-up and oversight. And the Democratic side of the state government isle isn’t proposing much else in the name of the environment. They do want to tax, but they do not support lessening the number of wells allowed to be drilled in PA. They too received campaign funds from the industry.

What’s worse, even if there are no accidents, even if we do everything “right” as far as protecting our watersheds, our forests and farms are going to vanish, replaced by gas well sites. New roads and open space will be clear cut in our woods to make way for the heavy equipment, pipelines, maintenance vehicles. Penn’s Woods will shrink even further. Our ridge tops, which have been held, almost sacredly by the hands of the Bureau of Forestry, Parks, or Game Commission will be trashed to make other people money (because don’t believe the hype, that money will not stay in PA unless it is in the form of a tax). Deforestation will lead to the fracturing of our woods, which will negatively impact wildlife. There will be greater runoff into our creeks, less shade for the headwater streams, increased water temperatures, fish kills, etc., etc., etc.

We live our lives in et ceteras. We blur over what’s truth and try to forget about it. Please write to your local representative and the governor if you live in PA. Ask for a moratorium on hydraulic fracking, or at least more oversight, a severance tax, and no more wells drilled on state lands.

Place Blog #5: Headwaters

Winter is playing tug of war with Spring. The days: 40s, even 50 degrees one day this week. Nights: back down into the 20s. This give and take is mostly give as we step further and further into the new season. With the ice gone, I figured it would be a good time to go and visit the headwaters of Lost Creek, which I pictured to be swollen and easy to find in the woods now.

From my house, I access the trailhead that takes me to the uppermost reaches of Lost Creek by making one left turn, heading up Rt. 235 to the top of Shade Mountain. This “mountain,” a dwarf like every other hill in Pa, is the fractured remains of a whittled-down anticline, an oak forest shading its ridge top. At the lot, I follow the thin, dashed line on the state forest public use map in my hand, which is much too broad in scope, way too large in scale. It looks as if I don’t have to walk far from the parking lot to the creek crossing —a swift, cursive swish of the cartographer’s tool. Yet, I know this is an allusion but estimate that it’s still less than a mile.

As I start down the trail, I begin to realize my mistake in coming here. Of course, I have known for years that you don’t mountain bike after the early Spring thaw, but my sheltered life for the past 7 months have erased my memory. It seems as if the entire mountain is mud. My boots sink at least an inch into the earth with each step. I feel as if massive slabs of mountain are going to slough off in a muddy landslide as I descend a ravine. I wonder if I should turn back, knowing that I could get hurt at the worst, and at the least, I am putting undue stress on this trail. But I’m determined to find the origins of Lost Creek—my guide, the compass in the past year and a half as I’ve been trying to feel out the lay of the land of my new home.

But as I continue on, I realize my impact is the least of this trail’s worries.  In banked switchbacks, deep ruts are cut into the mud, down past the disturbed roots of rhododendron, down to rocks that were the only thing holding the hillside together. And even some of those were kicked up and tossed aside. Apparently, this trail had been approved by the state for motorized vehicles like dirt bikes, and a few “locals” were out here “muddin’.”

Locals? Wait. What do I mean by that? Aren’t I myself now a local? Do I mean redneck? Hick? How can I when I too grew up in a rural landscape and claim to be the most comfortable in those “borderlands” where agriculture abuts silviculture. What makes me so different?

As I walk a little further, I find one thing that makes me a little different. Not better, not more intelligent, just different.

In an especially mucky section of trail, some of the motor heads have placed a series of hewn logs side by side to build a buried bridge in this “quickmud.” Not a particularly obtrusive addition to the woods, maybe rocks could have been a better, less obvious addition, but much more practical in supporting the weight of a dirt bike. Anyway, as I know my “neighbors” must have busted over this feat of environmental engineering, they heard only the firing and roar of their two-stroke engines. I, though, standing with feet balanced on the outmost logs of the bridge, hear the low gurgle of water. No stream runs above ground, but it sounds as if the gurgle is coming from uphill. I walk up the sludgy bed of mud, which now works its way between the cuff of my pants and the tongue of my boots. After, I don’t know, ten to twenty yards, I come upon a boulder-garden at a steeper section of the mountain. Still no water seen, but I can hear a louder chug of water, running underneath the ground. I climb up a few of the bigger rocks, and find just the smallest cupping of land—a bathtub basin, rimmed by rocks and lined with fermenting leaves.

I couldn’t see where the water came in, as the pool started somewhere under another cantilevered rock, and I couldn’t see where it left, as it dove under more stone. But I felt, here, I had found it. This was not the demarked beginning of Lost Creek, as I had only gone halfway to the official creek crossing on the map. And by no means did I believe that this was the only sweetwater spring that gave birth to the creek. Dozens of similar springs rose out of nothing but the intersection of the watertable with the exposed world. But I felt satisfied, as if this spring rose out of something more. That the convergence of water, rock, mud, and me somehow brought this trickling pool out of a deeper well, as if I struck the stone with my walking staff and caused the river to run.

Another day, I’ll find the “official” headwaters. Right now, I’ll go home and wash the mud from my own feet.