Stream Loggers
By Karen Houle
It swallows the consequence down, so to speak, together with what it learns.
—Wittgenstein, "On Certainty"
One man and one woman park the government Jeep
on the gravel shoulder of the Grand River watershed.
Paired, they walk chest-high through Queen Anne’s lace,
lime-tufted burdock, to a barbed-wire fence, growing
into the flesh of the Bauman tree line.
He steps it down for her. She climbs over him
into the automatic quiet of the Hogsback Woods.
Stiff rubber boots, stiff rubber gloves—
Nothing is pliable, a ridge between them
squeaking slightly as they trudge.
*
Ephemeral streams expand and contract with variation in basin moisture conditions.
Some flow during wet seasons and others are episodic, only flowing during and for short periods following heavy rainfall.
Or snow melt. An ephemeral creek is not a snack-sized river;
won’t become a river given a little time.
It’s a hydrologic imperfection, a profound
coupling of aquatic and terrestrial systems:
a horizon of water and dirt.
The role headland areas play in the dynamics of the entire watershed...in predominantly agricultural basins...is especially important as the modification and location of these streams has a great effect on downstream water quality and quantity.
*
One man and one woman
in simulated conditions with limited supply
have gone on ahead, heading out too early
it is still pitch dark.
that the design would not fail,
that the direction of flow
was not as expected during set up.
*
The headwater of Cruickston Creek—
a tiny region of wet function in the spongy lungs
of unlogged spruce, of juvenile seep-ins
of field tiles from Jim Dam’s cash crop gunning
the flow of standing water into a steep
dredged down ditch.
*
A stilling pool, a firstborn, a float
to mark it, a little science dot, a candled egg
upstream with translucent salamanders
speckling like a new flashlight shone on them.
The optic nerve, a second spring is born. She
senses the join between things and persons
as distance, the rusted wire bites
the creek’s full tilt, its high quantity of silt
transportation; there’s a sweet spot near the bottom
of a perennial stream she gives them
the biggest pool of light.
*
All the length of the ephemeral channel
installed sensors now form a network of sense data.
They read flow events and feed the data
into state loggers.
A trickle of promises.
Re-zero, recalibrate
the basic idea of what a creek is:
expansion and contraction,
drainage and seepage,
discharge and infiltration,
wetting and drying events,
coalescence, disintegration.
The idea of a creek;
The idea a family—
processes of ongoing delivery
within the adjacent hill slopes¹—
inconstant expression
of the ongoing effort
of physical and energetic components
of an overall state, the absolute whole
of the water and the absolute whole of its ground,
togethered, lifting the back legs, entering
the wet space, the tight coupling.
—————
¹ Bhamjee and Lindsay
Copyright Credit: Karen Houle, "Stream Loggers" from The Grand River Watershed. Copyright © 2019 by Karen Houle. Reprinted by permission of Gaspereau Press.
Source: The Grand River Watershed (Gaspereau Press, 2019)