By Ron Lora

A Country Boy Reflects on Water

I grew up on a farm in good country. A creek ran through the southwestern corner of it. A creek is a natural waterway larger than a run but smaller than a river. In romantic lore, poets have celebrated the rivers of the earth - the Rhine and Danube, the Volga and Don, the Tigris and Euphrates. In Allen and Putnam counties it's the Riley, the Blanchard, the Auglaize and Ottawa of which natives speak. So close to home, those small waters seldom rise to the level of romance.

Cranberry Creek

Old maps name my creek the Cranberry. A thousand years ago it would have provided residence for a water spirit, and the curative powers of its holy water would have comforted the afflicted. Today, when assessing farmers for its maintenance, Allen Country officials, displaying an infallible instinct for the commonplace, refer to it as the Smith Ditch.

Smith Ditch is a workable tag to collect taxes, but a reputable nymph or water sprite would not have chosen so common a home. Ditches are dug for drainage or irrigation, often alongside a road. Years ago the Cranberry meandered its own way, and by doing so defined itself.

The portion of the Cranberry I know best runs for not quite half a mile through my boyhood home along Grismore Road, six miles west of Bluffton, Ohio. Its width is approximately thirty-five feet at the top of the banks, which in turn stand six to ten feet above creek bed. Water levels change with the seasons, highest in spring and lowest in summer. Normally in winter they range from six inches in places to three and a half feet at the deepest point.

No abyssal depths there, only a tideless creek. In esthetic quality the Cranberry hardly resembles its look of twenty-five years ago. Numerous trees dotted the banks then, with a gigantic one at each its three bends. In places the thick underbrush obscured our front-porch view of the road. All that has vanished, removed by ditch cleaners seeking to speed its flow as the Cranberry winds its way northward before emptying into the Blanchard River.

During the years of my youth this stream of water offered endless delight. Countless times it came in a whisper, paraphrasing the poet, whom I had not yet read: "I must go down to the creek again."

Water in the Country

A country boy thinks about water as a matter of habit, for his family's livelihood depends upon it. Outside the house, at mid-twentieth century, he pumped water by hand. He knew nothing of a public water system. In his first days in elementary school he took note when a simple spigot brought forth an overflowing of what he already understood ought not be wasted or taken for granted.

In rural America water comes directly from springs or wells, and you know their location. Our farm had four wells, two that were kept in working order, one by the house, another at the barn. The creek had two springs that mattered to children. One we dammed up with crushed stone and gravel in long afternoons of play, and into the other, near the bridge where the creek leaves Allen for Putnam County, we seated a short pipe to create a drinking fountain - a place of refuge for the days the summer sun beat down as we worked the nearest fields.

The key to a creek is water, without which there is merely a channel. School books tell us that a molecule of water consists of two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen, that nothing in nature is more universal as a solvent - a throwaway point, perhaps, until it registers that all life depends on water's ability to form solutions with numerous different chemical compounds.

Moreover, water is odorless, tasteless, and colorless, say the books. A country boy may want to quibble. Only in a laboratory is that true, for in nature absolutely pure water in liquid form is hard to find. Ask those who enjoy a studied relationship with water what it is and they will tell you that it's more than a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, that indeed it does have taste, and sometimes odor, too. Moreover, it's an element that displays itself in the most beautiful images - in poetic form as a snowflake.

Magic

We are in awe of the ethereal beauty of the high white clouds, the majesty of Niagara, the resistless advance of distant glaciers, and the inscrutable darkness of the sea. Whether in creek or pond, ocean or low-country bayou, there is magic in the presence of water. The gates of the imagination swing open and sensations of the heart foretell a new Age of Aquarius - which the astrological seers describe as a peaceful epoch when the wrongs of the world will be made right.

The Cranberry teamed with life. Small organisms abounded, visible to the naked eye. Water beetles, dragon flies, and muskrats, the latter pursued in wintertime by neighboring trappers. Snakes occasionally moved through the water or sunned near rocks. So far as I knew they were harmless, but Sunday school stories had rendered them odious.

Minnows, tadpoles, and frogs absorbed much of the time devoted to animal watching. The creek harbored fish, too, carp in the deepest parts, but not many. Lean and hardy, they survived even when the stagnant water of summer nearly dried up. Whiskered catfish kept school under a bridge a quarter mile upstream, avoiding a run to mix with other freshwater dwellers.

After dusk the croakers and other noisemakers joined with crickets and Katydids to provide the music of the night. It is no effort to conjure up the chorus sounds that entered my bedroom window during summer nights - and they are peaceful to the ear.

During one winter trip to the creek during my early teens I lay down on ice that had escaped the rippling effects of the wind. Its crystal clarity encouraged minnow watching. sI looked down, lost in wonder about the world the three-inch fish inhabited and their place in the story of life. Democratic creatures, they appeared, darting and turning in unison on missions they may not have understood.

Did we have some relationship, they and I, and if so should I not know? The irritation of doubt is unavoidable when you think hard about the natural world and there is plenty of time. As the cold gathered, I stood up and returned to the house to put on warm clothes.

The continuous flow of water turned one's thoughts to the nature of time. On such occasions the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes seemed appropriate: "All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." The Teacher had other lessons in mind, but the theme of eventual return fit well the hydrologic cycle of precipitation-evaporation-condensation. We observe that process directly when we stay close to the water.

Other questions arose whenever I took a water journey westward from the bridge on Grismore Road. The answers were ambiguous, but the wonder of those walks led to a fascination with water that has not faded. It was as a Seeker on the little Cranberry and in conversations with my father that I leaned an eternal truth: to conserve water is to conserve life.

Ambivalence and Danger

There is a loneliness that comes in the silent presence of water. Imagine that the night is late. A solitary person stands before a body of water whose very darkness is mysterious. The night sky reveals the vastness of space, hinting of a billion galaxies beyond. Quiet reigns, all thought of the day is done, and the constricting rules of rational life relax their discipline.

Naked and alone at that moment, we are open to remarkable human energies within. In our deepest awareness, we sense that all life reaches back to our planet's aqueous womb, that truly it is our ancestral home. That awareness comes to us as longing for a peaceable security that in the everyday world of work and sweat is in short supply. Such knowledge does not stand in need of justification, for it arises from the unconscious with all the persuasiveness of a powerful dream - perhaps even as a reminiscent vision of the shadow world beyond.

The book of Genesis says, "For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." There is no wish to question such sublime poetry, yet accuracy has its charms. One need only remark that in filling seven-tenths of the human body and covering more than 70 percent of the earth's surface, water exercises a certain dominion over us.

Perhaps our globe should be called Planet Water instead of Planet Earth. If nothing more, it would highlight a central mystery or our planet: why is water so abundant here and so difficult to find elsewhere?

Did I say mystery? How poorly we understand the tangled web of life. Schooled in the modern dispensation of science and reason, we are not wholly rational creatures, but are perhaps fated to seek endlessly for a key that may be lost.

We take pride in the technological apparatus that envelops the world, and rightly so, for it supports our long struggle to enrich human life. Yet we rest uneasy in the grip of a technological culture. Daily we connect with others through the electronic media, yet we are as our inheritance has made us. The human need for drama and a measure of philosophic certainty renders suspect the worldly, operational values imposed on us by the techno-scientific process.

This ambivalence about technology has its parallel with water. We treasure it as our life blood, but sense danger. Our continental wandering through the great stream of time prevents us from ever again embracing the sea. We cannot breath or live or reproduce in water. If there is too much or too little is us, we disappear forever. Were the deepfreeze of the Polar Regions ever to melt, the lowlands of the planet would rejoin the oceans.

In the long view of history, however, the greater danger comes when water and wind wear down the peaks and fill in the hollows, thereby eroding the land. During my years beside Cranberry Creek the relentless struggle between land and water went on. The battle is slower now that the hogs are gone.

Over the course of four decades they took away the heavy grass and loosened the dirt with such efficiency that decade by decade we saw the creek banks widen. Years ago the hogs were removed from the creek side of the farm, and since then the ditch cleaners have obscured forty years of history. The lessons remain, however.

God's World, Our Work

If the earth were flat, without contrasting elevations, the oceans would reclaim it. All of it. If we rely solely on the market mechanism of supply and demand to protect our natural inheritance, we will lose it. Nature is on speaking terms with those who cooperate with it, but it exacts a price from those who do not. Sound advice it is that we listen to her messages, for they carry wisdom earned at heavy cost.

Our deepest interest (I speak here of survival value) lies in keeping water clean and in covering the soil where the raindrop hits in order to slow its journey to the sea. Too often we act as though that is God's work. It's not. It's our work. The command is heavy on us to do our duty as we stand on nature's watch. More than three centuries ago the English poet John Milton got it right: "Accuse not Nature!" he wrote. "She has done her part; Do thou but thine."