There is a fine little creek that runs over a quarter mile through our property. It's a bit of a rarity in these parts both because it's a bonafide creek, not a constructed drainage ditch, and because it's substantially spring fed. It originates a long mile upstream and builds volume quickly with water from springs and field tiles along its course. Aptly named Spring Creek, it gurgles and pools it's way through a respectably wooded watershed as it begins its grand journey to far away places.
Decades ago a prior owner of the property, one Thurman Crook, refused to join with landowners north and south in an effort to straighten the creek’s meandering course. It was an era when land managers held a strong objective to move water quickly downstream so land could be effectively drained and put to wise and prosperous use. It was a merciless effort, completed with great ingenuity and efficacy, and potholes and marshes and a splendid assortment of associated wildlife met their demise.
North of us the Grand Kankakee Marsh once occupied more than 1500 square miles as it sprawled beyond the main channel of the Kankakee River. Over an 81 mile straight line distance, the river snaked its way through 2000 twists and loops, extending its overall length by three times. With countless waterways threading off in all directions it surrounded vegetated spits of sand and was speckled with thousands of muskrat and beaver lodges. Eye witnesses spoke of waterfowl in numbers that would blacken the sky. The Grand Kankakee was placed among the most extensive and impressive marshes east of the Rocky Mountains, second only to the Everglades. Today it’s essentially gone.
Thurman Crook, Indiana congressman, school teacher, carpenter, horticulturist, and sheep farmer preserved Spring Creek’s delightful serpentine course through his land, so today the north and south extensions of the creek are arrow straight, its natural, historic loops still visible beyond the spoil left from the dredger. Nowadays, with some semblance of logic discovered, we recognize the value in those loops and in wetlands overall for collecting sediment, purifying water, restoring aquifers, providing habitat. What farmers were once paid to drain they are now paid to restore.
When our boys were young we might head to the creek on hot summer days to build a dam of rock and mud and create a pool of refreshment. Floating there, we were irrefutably linked to all that lay downstream, the river and the greater rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and every ocean of the globe. We were, in that moment, tangibly connected to the lifestream of the planet, and could close our eyes and see the deciduous woodlands bordering the lazy Ohio and Mississippi, the giant cypress of Louisiana bayou country, the white sands and palms rimming the Gulf, the aquamarine Caribbean, the blending of oceans east and west. Ultimately, we might reach up and lay our hand on polar ice.
It’s a lesson in connectedness, of everything intricately tied to everything else. It’s a powerful notion, extending beyond our own planet. Astrophysicists have us linked with the stars, sharing essential elements that allowed life to form. Within our biosphere there are innumerable strands binding everything together, all of it, and even the tiniest of interruptions have consequences.
Back in the creek on that hot summer day we take a different look at our connections. We see the rivers filled with topsoil forever lost due to poor land use. We see industry and municipalities dumping refuse, destroyed habitats, game fish replaced by species adapted to low oxygen levels. We see the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an area 6000 to 7000 square miles at the mouth of the Mississippi, where few species survive. We see beaches plagued by red tides, destined to be inundated with rising seas from melting polar ice.
Beavers moved into Spring Creek 25-odd years ago bringing change that could not be overlooked. They built a lodge on the bank of a pond on our property that lay 30 feet from the stream. Then they dammed the stream, creating wetland to the east and opposite the pond. When water levels behind the dam precisely matched the adjacent pond level, they bore a canal three foot deep and four feet wide, connecting the pond to their newly established impoundment. Over the years they have added to and improved the dam, totally inundating the canal and the strip of land separating the pond and creek.
Young beavers tend to move upstream, which they have done here, and continue to build more dams. Today some of the original serpentine loops left from the dredging days are filled once again with water, and the main creek channel in places has been totally relocated. It’s a remarkable achievement. I can’t help but notice in periods of torrential rain how the water raging in the straightened stream above suddenly slows and spreads and calms as it meets the beaver engineered floodplain. This is not to mention the appeal the new habitat has to both migrating and resident waterbirds, to minnows and crawfish, to aquatic insects and furbearers.
There have been accommodations. The beavers have effectively taken trees, sometimes within feet of our house, which we had planted and planned to enjoy for decades. They have made donning boots a necessity in reaching portions of our property. They have totally inundated an old travel trailer once used for weekend escapes. But thus far we have given them free reign and view their presence of far greater value than their absence. They are plugging along, living life as beavers do, putting the meander back in streams, improving water quality, providing flood control, creating living conditions suitable for a host of unrelated species. They are contributing mightily to the grand web connecting it all.
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