May 10, 2020
A Creek Eats Everything
The Audelia Branch seems quaint. It’s vicious.
These are thoughts on the physical world at its best and at its worst.
At its best, the Audelia Branch of White Rock Creek is clear. It burbles in the way streams in romantic literature do. It flows like the brisk walk of a person out for some mild cardio — in no rush for anything but to be in good health. It settles where it belongs, just below a lush line of small reeds. This condition is most sustained in the spring and fall, when the rains are here and the temperatures are pleasant.
In the stretch through my housing complex, it sustains thousands of creatures. American plantain trembles in the eddies. Hundreds of Blanchard’s cricket frogs and Gulf Coast toads spill onto the lawns that apron the creek’s banks off my apartment balcony. Get close, and you’ll notice ripples form perfect “V”s, traveling every direction on the surface’s slightly tilted plane. This is the sign of sunfish darting into the cobble.
You can jump across Audelia in many places, and where you can’t, stones make a dry path to traverse, like hopscotch. When my daughter is here in the summers, she retakes control of her Secret Hideout, a place the creek has carved from the apartment complex just after its water enters the property. A trail leads off a staircase that’s been in disrepair for some time. This 100 feet of creek bank is obscured in a bramble of red tip photinia and American ash, so you miss it until a child exercising her robust sense of wonder shows it to you. Harper and several friends made this place their own two summers ago.
It’s hydrology that crafted the Secret Hideout. This place in the world was once a seabed graveyard of shelled creatures called coccolithophores, the same animals that make up the White Cliffs of Dover, across the pond. After the late Cretaceous, when they were laid, these fossils were compressed by natural forces into the limestone formation known as Austin Chalk.
Recently, in the last 10,000 years, successions of receding ice, periodic and violent wildfire, and grazing bison created a pristine prairie here. During this time, aboriginal humans — Caddo, Waco, Wichita — rested at the springs that feed such creeks. The American Indians were vanquished to less-desirable Oklahoma, and white “civilization” — another natural force — has changed all of that. The bison were extirpated. Ranchers brought in cattle and built fences to keep them in. Birds perched on those fences and pooped the seeds of woody forbs and trees. Forests grew from these. And what we call a “metroplex,” America’s seventh-largest, materialized.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, in her own geologic time Audelia carved wounds in the blackland gumbo, sometimes two stories deep from the surrounding elevation, all the way down to the Austin Chalk. The foliage, much of it carried here from the Old World, now bends toward sister flora on the other bank in tunnels that are dark enough to be thought of as mystical. Different ages are exposed.
But I doubt Harper sees it in that historic that way. When I was a kid, I’d crawl into thickets and think of them as portals to an alternate universe, not a different eon. Either way, the mystery persists. What can she find in there? Giant pythons? Stranger things have been discovered in the metroplex. Unicorns? Harper has written to me they’re real, and I can’t prove the absence of a thing.
Audelia does not know or care about my conception of when it’s “at its best.” It cycles according to the weather patterns. The things that live in it respond to human behavior in ways we don’t like. It keeps cutting deeper.
Sometimes, it lets me watch it. On nice days when I’m not wallowing in human enticements or working in a warehouse, I walk up and down the banks taking photographs and notes. I learned this in back-to-back nature photography and field journaling courses I took last year. Peering at the creek’s ecology reveals a world that’s very different from the one I have conceptualized in my apartment.
When I appear on the bank, sunfishes and red swamp crayfishes duck into the cobble. If I’m feeling patient, I wait for them to forget about me and come back out. The birds and insects that drink, bathe, and copulate in the water are more willing models. They’re used to humans. We feed them. There are blue jays, robins, phoebes, which swallow the insects. Bigger birds, like great egrets, great blue herons, and green herons, stalk fish.
The most illusive beasts are the diamondback water snakes. One day my first summer here, the heat was taking the last of Audelia’s water and giving it to the sky. A water body does not dry up in a flash. When it’s down to its final, gasping breath, there is enough time for a run on resources. You may have seen documentary footage of Nile crocodiles congregating in dwindling desert billabongs. Wildebeests and other primary consumers, in the throes of dehydration, travel ungodly distances to these waterholes, making easy targets for the massive reptiles. They’re snagged by a hoof, a lip, a tail and dragged under to be rolled to death. Humans do it, too. Driven by a perceived scarcity, we recently created actual scarcity of toilet paper at Walmarts.
A similar event happened in Audelia. My neighbor was poking around in the reeds on the shoreline. “There are tons of snakes down here,” she distracted Harper and me on our stroll to my apartment from the parking lot. We diverted our course to the stream. Small groups of sunfish, numbering in the dozens, had run out of water to swim through and were trapped in puddles in the streambed. Maybe 15 serpents raced through these puddles hooking the panicky darters with their tiny, razor-sharp fangs and hauling them into snake holes on the shore. One of the largest snakes, which wasn’t very large at all at about two feet, had wrangled a sunfish about a third of its length and probably four or five times bigger than its head onto a dry part of creek bed. The snake’s jaws and throat were stretched around the spasming ichthyoid form like a balloon about to tear. The only act the snake could muster was to withdraw one fang and reposition it slightly farther down the sunfish’s anatomy, drawing it an imperceptible bit farther down its maw.
The terrifying scene was over in less than one day, and Audelia remained dry for weeks that never ended. Until finally, it rained. Now, it’s rare that you see a snake.
Because humans believe we have primacy over the physical world and its processes, we therefore think we can and should bend it to our advantage. Dallas-Fort Worth’s human managers paved over most of the springs that formerly served as communal gathering places for the aboriginal peoples who used to take better care of this region. They constructed thoroughfares over the streams. They boxed many of them in with massive concrete or brick edifices to force water to leave town faster, to stay indefinitely, to not cut banks, to encase its flow in a static regime. The building of these structures is referred to in the field of water management with the euphemism “channelization.” It’s part of our strategy of floodplain management, which can have the unintended side-effect of making floods worse. Since paved ground cannot absorb water, it has nowhere to go but up.
Audelia, or at least the stretch that passes my apartment, seems a rare holdover in this process. It won’t be a ghost stream. It snakes through the complex relatively unaltered. But even on this property, several stretches are bricked into a very specific channel. Some of these brick walls carry themselves with a pleasant architectural aesthetic. But the most noticeable is where the stream flows through a pair of retaining walls, between apartment buildings 3, on the north, and 4, on the south.
On all other parts of the property, the creek is swallowing everything. Willow, camphor, and American ash trees line the banks, which sink with every bit of sediment the stream carries down toward White Rock Creek, of which Audelia is a tributary. Each tree within, say, 30 feet of Audelia, is slowly arching to its demise in the creek. Trees closer to the water, seem more prone to poison ivy and Japanese honeysuckle, which strangle them. Last week, a leaning but once proud black willow, wrapped in a strangling ivy, succumbed to these forces and a mild wind. It crashed to the bank. In some time, a brush crew will come clean it, but as of now, fungus and insects have begun the inexorable process of slowly devouring it.
An old woman with a crutch and a fancy protective facemask (it’s more than an N95) makes her way every night to the mailboxes, and my unit is on her way. If I’m at my high table on the porch, where I sometimes smoke pot and watch the insects at night, she stops to fill my head with Eastern health remedies for affluent ailments like allergies and outlandish tales of the complex’s wildlife. She swears a beaver that is rumored to have holed up in nearby stretches of the creek befriended her and swings by her unit sometimes to request lengths of wood to pulp. It introduced itself to her by nuzzling up against her leg. She assumed it was a large cat before she looked down at it. It looked at her and then at a log she had on her balcony. Back at her. Back at the log. Until she retrieved the log and gifted it to the beaver.
I’ve not seen the beaver, but I’d wager it’s as likely to have solicited a log from the old woman as it is to be cavorting someplace with Harper’s unicorns.
But I do believe the woman’s story about her recent temporary displacement. She has just moved back into the apartment she came here to live in after the complex renovated it, for a time housing the woman in a different apartment. I feel for her; she’s disabled and doesn’t move around too well. Moving is visibly difficult for her. I offered to help, but she declined. She wants to get in better shape, she said, and besides, the whole mess was part of natural processes, she explained.
You see, one microscopic particle of geology at a time, Audelia is eating the complex’s old buildings right along with the trees. The great difficulty of property ownership in North Texas is the shifting ground. Homeowners are often forced to reconstruct their foundations because the blackland gumbo compresses under the weight of the home, buckling the concrete.
The same is happening to the apartment buildings in my complex. Audelia doesn’t help. The retaining walls may slow her, but she is patient to devour the ground, creating an impossible ravine leaning stones and plants. The old woman’s building — No. 5, just to the east of 3 — was beginning to buckle and sink into the creek, which is the slow-moving disaster that spurred the renovation. It’s even protected by its own retaining wall.
The fall of 2018 was the wettest on record in North Texas. It seemed to rain every day of September. One night, during a heavy downpour, I was drinking beer and watching TV. I got up for another bottle and happened to look out the glass sliding door that leads to my balcony. Normally, Audelia’s edges swirl about 100 feet from the walking trail just off the porch. Now in the deluge, it had swallowed about one-third of that distance and was creeping at a visible pace toward my apartment.
Visions of Houston’s traffic infrastructure swallowed in Hurricane Harvey the prior summer flashed on the backs of my eyelids. I looked again. The violent current knocked over the dog waste station just down the trail. Audelia was subsuming bases of trees. Where she was normally five or six feet wide, she was now maybe 200 feet across in places.
I frantically warned my neighbor, saying I was getting out and she should, too. I packed some things, moved my books up from the bottom shelves. In the space of maybe five minutes, I’d prepared my psyche for putting up in a hotel, moving, reacquiring all my belongings. I grabbed my dog’s leash and went out for another look. Quickly as she’d risen, she was subsiding again.
It became clear that the ecosystem in Audelia is not distinct from my own. Since I’ve lived in this apartment, I’ve struggled with pests, including a nasty murine infestation, which I cured by adopting a cat. I normally don’t want to kill anything, but in a moment of weak frustration at nature’s incursions, before I invited the feline into my home, I visited the administrative office in the complex. The manager said she’d have someone come take a look, imparting a shrug and an insight:
“We live by the creek, you know?”
The physical world is not content to stay out of my apartment or between the retaining walls. That “flood” was not a singular event. Since that day, I’ve seen the creek rise to levels that concerned me several times. It’s going to keep happening. Audelia will get in someday.
