ENDPAPER 



Where the River Stops Runnin: 



Home was on a broad ridge 

 where the river began. You 

 couldn't see rippling pools, 

 waterfalls, or rapids there. In fact, 

 you couldn't even find our spring 

 unless you looked for it. 



My family's land was high in the 

 watershed, stitched into the fabric of 

 Appalachian foothills. As a kid I 

 gradually pieced together the logic 

 that the puddles and wet swale 

 alongside our garden were 

 somehow connected to the 

 spring. When raindrops and 

 snowflakes fell on our soil, 

 they began a traceable journey 

 downhill, bound for the Gulf 

 ot Mexico, 1,500 miles away. 



As I grew older, I could 

 count my years by how far 

 downstream I had explored — 

 every bend opened wonders 

 to me. Beyond its outlet, our 

 spring became a creek that ran 

 down through a field, and out 

 to a deepening woods. The 

 woods were dominated by oak 

 and hickory, and darkened here 

 and there by an eastern hem- 

 lock. I spotted woodpeckers 

 drumming on dead elms. At 

 one of the widest places in my 

 stream I flushed a duck. Being 

 an upland boy, I had never seen 

 waterfowl of any kind. Though only a 

 mallard, I was thrilled at the iridescent 

 green of its head and ran home to tell 

 my mother. 



During my high school years those 

 Saturday-morning outings expanded 

 to daylong expeditions. I packed 

 lunch and hiked downstream as far 

 as I could, my increasing endurance 

 now a match for my unbounded 

 curiosity. My stream grew in volume 

 and its riffles gained some force. The 

 water pooled up in places big enough 

 for me to jump in. The stream and 

 its valley were amazingly wild for be- 

 ing only forty miles from Pittsburgh. 



Text and photographs 

 by Tim Palmer 



Then one day I heard the incon- 

 gruous rumble of truck noise ahead of 

 me on my path. Approaching cau- 

 tiously, afraid of what I would find, I 

 saw that my wild stream tunneled in- 

 to the darkness of a culvert beneath a 

 four-lane highway. Then, with all its 



distance covered, with its own life of 

 intimacy past, my little stream entered 

 the Ohio River. 



At that time the Ohio was the 

 largest, barge-floating cesspool in 

 America. In a few short feet my fami- 

 ly water mixed and then disappeared 

 into the oily flow of that eastern be- 

 hemoth. The river had once been one 

 of the biologically richest waterways 

 in America, but industrial barging had 

 overrun it for generations. 



In one culminating instant I un- 

 derstood what a stream should be, 

 and what it shouldn't. I sensed 



something tragic in raindrops and 

 headwater rivulets that had flowed 

 into the wrong river. This awareness 

 came solely from what I saw in that 

 meeting point. I wanted to capture it 

 in a picture, but couldn't: I didn't 

 own a camera. 



The Ohio stretched a quarter mile 

 across. Aging steel mills rusted along- 

 side it; traffic pounded its banks; and 

 railroad tracks cordoned off 

 the water. Furthermore, it 

 stank. What had once been 

 the ultimate life force had 

 become a conduit for waste — 

 a hazard to public health. 



The combined effect as- 

 saulted my senses completely, 

 yet something even more 

 troublesome was amiss. Dirty 

 water, after all, could be 

 cleaned up. Then I realized: it 

 had no flow. It didn't move. 

 Later I would learn that the 

 Ohio is dammed twenty-six 

 times in 981 miles, with 

 scarcely a hundred yards of 

 free-flowing river to be found 

 in its entire length. 



The Ohio showed me what 

 could happen to streams 

 when they became rivers. At 

 the time, I took my stream's 

 dammed and polluted out- 

 come simply as a lesson in the ways of 

 the world. An accompanying sense of 

 fatalism took me years to shed. What 

 I saw of course doesn't happen to 

 every stream, and even where it does, 

 there's no reason it must stay that way 

 forever. But these realizations would 

 come later. At that moment, I had to 

 walk back upstream — sensing the fate 

 of my family's waters. 



Tim Palmer is an award-winning author, 

 photographer, and conservationist, devoted 

 to the preservation of rivers. Tliis essay is 

 adapted from his book, Rivers of America, 

 which is hang published this month by 

 Abrams, New York. 



NATURAL history September 2006 



