Trying to hold it back: rivers, children, and time flowing by
By Jeff Opperman, WWF Global Freshwater Lead Scientist
This week, as I wrap up WaterYear — a year-long project of daily photography and stories — I’m reflecting on what made me want to do it. The project grew out of a love for rivers that took root during my childhood, a love made all the more poignant with the realization that not only was my childhood over (OK, a long time over…) but in the blink of an eye, the childhoods of my children were also over.
You see, the start of the 2023 Water Year (October 1, nearly a year ago) was also the start of my wife and I becoming proverbial empty nesters. I consoled myself with the thought that I’d now have an abundance of time and that I’d finally organize two decades of digital photos. As I started on that mission, I realized how many of my favorites featured our kids and water: streams, rivers, lakes, waterfalls.
A warning for soon-to-be empty nesters out there: immersion in photos of your children as beaming eight-year olds, splashing through the beloved neighborhood creek, is perhaps not the most emotionally placid journey to embark upon.
So, all these loves — of rivers, of my children — became intertwined and shot through with the sense of time rushing by, of how fleeting these moments are. And this image welled up: me standing in a river with my arms out, trying to hold it back. But it just keeps moving past. You can stand still and feel the water embrace you for that moment but then it just keeps flowing by.
Perhaps WaterYear’s one photo per day on social media is a pretty modest remedy for that flood of emotion, but hey, you work with the tools you’ve got.
So, the point of WaterYear was to explore the connections that matter — starting with our connections to each other and to nature, embedded within rivers’ own landscape of connectivity. That connectivity is also essential and, increasingly, at risk of becoming another precious but fleeting component of a world gone by.
Over the past few weeks, for reasons you’ll see below, I started focusing on my natal stream, so to speak. About how it shaped me, including both the career I chose and the parent I became.
Many of my colleagues in river science and conservation were drawn to our field through fishing or paddling. And though I certainly enjoy raft trips and have done some fishing, I’m not particularly skilled at either. (In fact, rather than passing angling down to my son, it went the other way: Luca — with preternatural skills that could only have been inherited from distant ancestors — is the one who taught me).
Something else seeped into me at an early age and drew me toward rivers.
I grew up with a creek in my backyard — Sulphur Springs, a tributary to the Chagrin River and one of Ohio’s few coldwater streams. Though I had no idea what a “coldwater stream” was (one that stays cold even in summer, thus capable of supporting trout) or why it was so rare in my part of the world, the creek captivated my childhood imagination with tethers that, years later, emerged again to pull on my adult brain.
As a child, I loved that my creek was always changing. It was really many different creeks during the course of the year: the one that was just a trickle in late summer that I forded with ease, to one that frothed and roared. When the rain poured down I would eagerly run down the well-worn path to watch the creek’s brown water creep steadily up the banks.
I also loved that the creek connected places. It was a corridor of freedom that penetrated the hard boundaries of a childhood world. I wasn’t allowed to cross the “park road” bordering our back yard. But following the creek I could go under that road and emerge from a tunnel, blinking, to the mysterious and forbidden other side. Perched above a deep pool, I saw silver flashes of large fish fleeing my shadow (The deep pool was formed by the force of the culvert-concentrated water plunging into the creek bed, contributing to downstream channel erosion, but of course I didn’t know that).
I could also follow the creek upstream, creeping silently and unseen through neighbors’ backyards, to a place we’d dubbed Paradise — a valley with a carpet of shimmering emerald green beneath tall trees. A waterfall cascaded lyrically into the deepest pool I knew — even during dry summers it was deep enough to wade in and cool off (it was another culvert-caused plunge pool and the emerald carpet was an unbroken understory of invasive ivy, but again, ignorance was truly bliss).
Fifteen years later, as I prepared to leave an internship in DC for graduate school in California, I visited a library and flipped through ecology journals, seeking areas of research that might interest me. I found a special issue of BioScience dedicated to river floodplains. As I skimmed its pages — and this may sound hard to believe — a description of the technical term “Flood Pulse Concept” sent a thrill through me. It resonated and reawakened those memories: yes, rivers change and connect and breathe and live.
Those two tethers that had captured my imagination — the restless, ever-changing river that connected different worlds — now captivated my brain. Rivers’ variability and connectivity underlay my dissertation research and my current work.
And, of course, they still hold my heart.
A few weeks ago, my daughter Wren was getting ready to leave for her sophomore year, and I felt that familiar rush of fleeting, flowing time. And I tried to hold it back.
Because I was also winding down WaterYear, it struck me that I’ve spent a lot of time hiking in, photographing, and writing about her backyard creek, but I’d never taken her to mine.
So, with just a day or two to spare, I managed to get a timeslot on her schedule (she has a lot of items — both logistical and friend-related — that have to be checked off before a departure). And she brought her crew: the friends who a decade ago explored, named, governed even, a magical land called KozmoZooey down the hill behind our house (though a geographer might call it “unnamed stream, Geauga/Cuyahoga county line”).
And just like that, I was standing in a small clearing above Sulphur Springs where I’d last stood more than 35 years ago. It felt intensely familiar.
“This was your creek, Doc Opps?” asked one of Wren’s friends (using a nickname they’ve given me, friendly satire about which type of doctors our society tends to bestow that honorific).
We made it only a short distance upstream before the tiny creek almost disappeared in a tangle of vegetation.
“We’ll have to go around.” We walked away from, and then parallel to, the creek, and a detail came back to me in a flash: “We called this area the Jungle.”
Now I could explain why. The ground was super saturated, even in late summer, so no big trees can grow here — just a wall of shoulder-high wetland plants and shrubby willows growing exuberantly in the absence of shading canopy.
The girls were sinking in black mud to their ankles and losing shoes.
But they laughed and joked, their years of training in KozmoZooey having served them well.
I turned and asked if they wanted to head back.
“No way! We keep going!”
So, with our childhoods definitely not over yet, we all kept slogging upstream toward Paradise.
