4 minute read
At the Water's Edge
A Year Beside Todd Creek
Poems by Nancy Canyon. Paintings by Ron Pattern
In my year-long tenure as a Writing the Land poet, I penned several poems about Todd Creek, the Whatcom Land Trust parcel I adopted. The Whatcom Conservation District is partnering with the Whatcom Land Trust to restore 22.4 acres of riparian habitat along this beautiful creek in the South Fork Valley of the Nooksack River in Whatcom County.
At the end of my tenure, Writing the Land: Channel, a book of land poets was published by NatureCulture.
Todd Creek at Forty-eight Degrees
I
The sound of the Nooksack is steady, rapids tossing & rolling, river rerouted around a tangle of uprooted alders. After the flood, fast water & forest debris blocked the road for days. Today is the day we first see the damage. Sticky mud coats the ground a hundred feet inland. Above Todd Creek, a mature maple rests on its side, its huge root ball lurching upward. Below the bank, the creek passes a logjam the size of a mill yard. At the confluence with the Nooksack, a revised spit curves into the river.
II
This morning we packed a thermos of tea, two sandwiches, two apples & chocolate, …always chocolate! Now we sit on the rocky beach eating lunch, taking in the eroded bank across the river. We estimate 30 feet of pasture washed away in the torrent. The Nooksack calmly eddies & swirls past the bank, whirlpooling back to take another swipe at the undercut. Small trees & large rocks create an island that twists up from beneath, splitting the river around the riprap. North of Bellingham, floodwaters forced evacuations. I’ve heard that the smell of a river & the fine silt deposited by floodwaters is almost impossible to clean away.
A sudden squall has us scrambling from beach to woods, laughing, slipping in the silty mud, coming to rest beneath tall maples. Heads tipped upward, we squint against raindrops splatting green leaves bright as spring grass.
III
Then there are the nutrients: minerals in the silt fertilize the land.
The grass at Todd Creek is waist-high now, like prairie grass before the dustbowl.
The sky is a deep blue-black, rain falling, the two of us tucked like cattle beneath the maples.
Finished with our lunch, R pulls up his hood & slips back onto the path.
I return my notebook to my backpack & fasten the closure, wend my way through wet grass
to follow the arc of cornfield. Overhead, seven turkey vultures lift on thermals. I imagine they’re
waiting for our insignificant lives to end. Beyond the scavengers the sky lightens, clouds begin to drift east. All around, a calm-quiet contrasts with the imagined roar of raging waters. We walk past the plowed field, heading back to the truck where we’ll scrape mud from our boots before climbing in.
IV Todd Creek—
despite the flood damage, the land is lush from silt: a sea of grass, saplings shooting skyward, blackberries thriving.
In the Water
Tree hormones flow through our blood bioidentical cells shared with cedars joined together by the river’s flood
Mother tree towers as family leader
Bioidentical cells shared with cedars blend our lives with the trees
Mother tree towers as family leader we bow down on our knees
Blend our lives with the trees mixing our chemistry together we bow down on our knees forest of siblings tethered
Mixing our chemistry together hormones shared with the beloved forest of siblings tethered tree hormones flow through our blood
Writing the Land
Writing the Land is a collaborative outreach and fundraising project for land protection organizations, partnering with nonprofit and environmental organizations to coordinate the “adoption” of conserved lands for poets. Each poet is paired with a specific site, usually for about a year, and they visit the location to create work inspired by a sense of place. This project emphasizes the importance of individual connection to land and place—inspiring others to visit or donate toward protecting these conserved lands of all types, including conservation easements, ranches, farms, ecosystems, habitats, sanctuaries, and wilderness preserves.
More info: www.writingtheland.org/
New Book by Nancy Canyon
Nancy Canyon’s new memoir, STRUCK: A Season on a Fire Lookout, about her time spent as a fire lookout in the Clearwater National Forest of Idaho was published in September.
Learn more at nancycanyon.com/books
