Geography of the James (Earth Lodge)

Reading over everyone’s posts, I’ve observed a developing trend.  A lot of you guys are comparing your favorite waterways to the James River.  Since I’m a conformist, I guess I’ll do the same!

I have lived in VA Beach my whole life.  For the first half of my life I lived near the Chesapeake Bay which locals call Chick’s Beach.  Then my family moved maybe 3 miles away to a house on the Lynnhaven River.  The Lynnhaven River is brackish and meets the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  It is known for its oysters, which many of you know have been the source of my young-adult income!

I have very fond memories about my life on the Lynnhaven River.  These memories are marked by beautiful sunrises, wildlife sightings, and recreation!  My favorite thing to do on summer nights is eat dinner with my family outside on our picnic table.

This river is very different from the James to me.  First of all, it is much smaller with a tiny watershed.  Second, it does not feel like a river at all.  It is very salty and not linear at all.  When most people think of rivers, they probably think of a long, thin body of water that meanders through valleys or something, not the Lynnhaven.

Also there are no rocks.  I thought about this when James talk to us about the rock formations, the cracks, and the potholes.  There are no rock formations like that back home.  It was so cool to examine the rock closely on Wednesday. I remember when I came to Richmond for school in 2010, my local friends took me to “The Rocks” at Belle Isle.  I remember thinking “This is their beach.  There’s no sand to lay your towel on.  Hmm…better be careful with my head.”

I still think rocks are great even when I have a preference for sand.  Rocks are like historical monuments from eons ago (I’m corny- Rocks Rock!)  I believe James told us the rock from the James River is from the Paleozoic age- and that the official name is “Petersburg Granite.”  For some reason when he told me this I thought, “I really hope this is never cut out to make someone’s countertop.”  Then I thought about dinosaurs roaming the river.

I think that the rocks of the James River contribute to most of its beauty.  Back home, I think that the wildlife is the best part of the Lynnhaven River.  I remember discussing the wildlife of the James River on Wednesday, but I had to shake my head a little because there is just SO much wildlife back home.  I’ve had crazy sightings from my backyard.  In late July and early August, sometimes I see packs of rust-colored sting rays flap their flippers across the river like they’re in a parade.  During high tide, a few otters will hop onto our pier.  We’ve regularly seen porpoises leaping out of the water.  This is all from my backyard.

I plan on attending grad school in Richmond.  When we were crossing the bridge at Belle Isle, I looked at the view downtown and thought, “This is a great river city.  I need water wherever I am.”

I’ve shared a picture taken of my pier back home:

It was taken after the hurricane so it’s a little wrecked.

I have always enjoyed exploring, and from my childhood to the present day I have spent a lot of time doing just that at Eighteen Mile Creek.  Originating in western NY in the Town of Lockport, Eighteen Mile Creek passes through my home town of Angola and ends as a tributary of Lake Ontario.  It is the main attraction of a small park near my house, coupled with a modest basketball court and some picnic tables.  Having lived in that area my whole life, I have seen the creek in all its states.  Springtime often brings flooding, and what is normally a calming body turns into a furious tide complete with rapids.  A friend once told me that after an aggressive storm, he was able to reach over a bridge and touch the water below, something that couldn’t be done with a 10-foot-pole otherwise.  When Summer comes, the creek frequently dries up, becoming a bed of rock devoid of life.  There are also the winter months, which in Western NY can get quite chilly.  Whenever the water freezes over, I like to bike to it and see if I can walk out onto it (it is normally rather shallow).  However, my favorite time at Eighteen Mile Creek is when it looks like what you imagine when you imagine a creek.  That time when the water level is high enough to allow life, yet low enough to still be safe.  When the sun is shining and the wind sometimes knocks leaves out of trees.  When you can really have fun.

It was times like these when I frequented the creek with whomever I could bring along with me, or by myself if there was no such person.  I’ve done everything from meticulously flipping rocks in search of crayfish to floating down the water on an inner-tube.  My favorite activity, however, has to be bridge-building.  A past time that I often carried out with my cousins, bridge-building involved scanning the riverbank for appropriately sized rocks, and then compiling said rocks in the creek to form a makeshift bridge.  We had to look for rocks that were flat enough to stand on, yet light enough that we could move.  The point of this activity was to see if we could cross the creek without falling in, which doesn’t make perfect sense because we were often wet after finishing the bridge.  Tossing all those semi-boulders in the water thoroughly splashed the surrounding area.  Sometimes we succeeded, and sometimes we didn’t, but we always had fun.

For me, Eighteen Mile Creek was one of those spots that led me to have a close connection to nature.  I have been able to appreciate all its forms, and I have seen how many different people interact with it.  It has been a place I go to when I need solitude, and a place I go to when I am with friends and family.  It has been a big part of my life.

After Wednesday’s class trip to the James, I decided that I wanted to visit the river again and see if it was any different after the storm and expected flooding. Even though it was a different section of the river than Belle Isle, it was very apparent that the water was much higher than usual because the steps leading down to the edge of the water were half submerged, and deep, sticky mud extended several feet up the bank, indicating that the water had been even higher not to long ago. I tried to think what could have possibly caused this drastic change, because I couldn’t remember any large rainstorms in the recent past, but I remembered the fact that the river begins on the other side of the state and any activity upstream is carried on downstream. In this case, this fact applies mostly to water and the change in the river’s height, but it also reminded me how any pollution and debris can easily flow downstream as well.

Unlike the small stream that I chose to make my reflection spot, evidence of animal life was abundant at this section of the James. Various types of birds sat in the middle of the river, paddling furiously to remain still as the water surged quickly past them. Unfortunately they were far away, and therefore impossible to identify, but I was able to tell that there were several different types. In addition to the birds, I saw the paw prints of an animal that had recently scurried along the muddy bank, and while I was not sure what had made them, I would hazard a guess that it was a river otter. When I got back to campus, I compared pictures of the prints to pictures of otter tracks I found on the Internet, and they looked nearly identical. I’ve never seen an otter in the wild before, and just seeing the tracks of one was exciting.

The surroundings of the portion of the river that I visited today were drastically different than those near Belle Isle, and while it was impossible to tell based solely on sight, I’m sure these differences also affected the amount of pollution that runs into the James. There were barely any buffer zones to protect the river from urban runoff as the water winds past Belle Isle, but in my section, a fairly thick band of forest surrounded the river on both banks, and thus helped protect the river from any pollutants in the watershed that could possibly run into the river. My earlier realization came back to me however, and I realized that while my section of the river had decent buffer zones, any urban environments with no buffers upstream of where I was standing could still harm the river. This isn’t to say that the buffers at my section of James were useless, because they still help prevent erosion and offer habitat to wildlife, but their usefulness is unfortunately diminished by the connected nature of the river.

Similar to many of my classmates, I have recently been reminiscing about my childhood home and have thought a great deal about how the rivers and watersheds back in Maine have directly affected my life. I was lucky enough to grow up in an area where I was almost always surrounded by water. My house in Maine is backed up to a runoff of the Mousam River that runs directly through my hometown of Kennebunk. I also am grateful to live a mere five minutes from the Atlantic Ocean. As one might think, I spent a majority of my days as a child either foraging down by the riverbanks near by house, or riding my bicycle down to the beach for the afternoon to enjoy the water (although it was generally freezing cold). I sought out the tranquility and excitement of the river and the beach mostly for recreational purposes, whether it was swimming or boogie boarding in the summer months, or ice-skating during the winter. Yet as I get older, I have come to realize that watersheds, such as the Mousam River, provide many different functions for different people.

I have recently been thinking about the Primitive Legacies chapter in the book In River Time, that we have been reading and keep coming back to the part about how the Native Americans who lived close to the James River had different uses for the James over time. At first, the James played only minor roles in the lives if the Natives, because the river did not contain fish yet, but as time progressed and temperatures began to rise, the river was stocked with fish and therefore the James became an integral aspect for all those who lived within it’s reach.

Access and control over watersheds has been important for almost all communities who have settled down in a particular region. I have come to realize that my immediate community is extremely dependent on such watersheds and access to the ocean for food sources and transportation. This past summer I spent two months working on a lobster boat fishing lobsters and crabs at the mouths of a few different rivers in Portsmouth and New Castle, New Hampshire. Especially during the summer months, lobster is one of the most sought after foods, not only in our area, but throughout New England and even in regions further away from the coast, hence lobster fishing is a major part of Maine and New Hampshire’s economies in the summertime.

Even though the changes that took place in order for the James to become a vital aspect of the lives of the natives who lived nearby took many many years to occur, I feel as though I have been able to comprehend some of the different functions that watersheds such as local rivers can offer to different people through my experiences over the past decade. I never used to look to the water as an essential source for food or transportation, but rather only as a source of enjoyment. I hope to explore even more functions of watersheds throughout this year as well.

Here’s one particular quote that I liked from the chapter in, In River Time:

“So intimately de-pendent on the river were they for its sweet waters, its fish, its attractions for game, its protection, even for a sense of location and direction, that they accepted it as a major fact of their natural existence. They took its gifts as they could, very likely unable to imagine that there could be more. The rhythms of their lives were governed by those of nature, as were those of the animals they hunted.”

Last week I was at the US Naval Academy for a leadership conference.  There were many speakers and panels that talked about the topic of the Leadership in Crisis.  On one of the panels was Jonathan Messinger who was in charge of the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.  An oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska and affected around 1,300 miles of shoreline.  I found hearing Messinger’s side of the story very insightful.

Messinger’s came across very unapologetic for the spill during his talk (although at the end he did say it hurt him to see pristine nature destroyed).  He seemed to think the whole clean up effort was pointless legal action forced on the company by radical environmentalists.  At one point he even said that the ecosystem would have recovered on its own if it was just let alone.  However, regardless of his person views on the need for the clean up he explained the great lengths that he went to to ensure they followed the legal actions required of the company.

I was surprised to hear him say that an ecosystem could recover from such a bad oil spill.  It made me think of the saying “dilution is not the solution to pollution.”  I think this idea is very relevant to issues of pollution in watersheds also.  While the affects of the oil spill would eventually seem unapparent with the expansiveness of ocean, but with watersheds issues of point source pollution could have a huge impact.

Messinger also brought up the difficulty that they faced with the clean up and how the process of steaming the shoreline to get rid of the oil slick actually stripped the land of all nutrients, and how they had a very hard time finding appropriate fertilizer and spreading it along all 1,300 miles.  The whole process of procuring helicopters, boats, and people to help clean up this remote area made me wonder if the clean up used up more natural resources than were restored through the clean up.  The relationship between environmental impact and legal restoration interested me greatly, especially since I think these issues were exemplified well in such a major crisis but could be applied to smaller conflicts over water pollution.

Would you go spend an hour or so at the James River? Well probably. Now would you do it in February? Maybe. Would you do it if it was forty degrees outside. Probably not. Should you? Probably.

Today my suite-mate and I visited the James River. We drove up to Huguenot Flatwater, a place I had gone several times in the summer for kayaking and canoeing. I doubt anyone would do that in today’s weather, myself included.

Instead of kayaking or swimming, we walked around and followed the trails. We found an outlook with the clearest view and stood there, watching the river go by. The James was higher than I can remember. Steps that led into the river, were completely gone. The surrounding trails were more mud than path. And logs and trunks of trees flowed quickly and effortlessly down the river. Strangely enough we haven’t gotten much rain or snow but upstream must have gotten slammed. The noisy birds however were a welcome change from the cars on the bridge. And the bridge even though it is still undergoing construction, looked great from the river.

The mud path had cracked and fractured in the cold, and somewhere in the path of mud we found some really interesting footprints. They weren’t a dogs, and definitely not birds. We assumed they were otter but I’m still not fully convinced. You be the judge.

The path broke into what looked like a bamboo forest with a giant Sycamore tree. The bamboo, well we thought it was bamboo…we’re pretty bad at this identification thing, was still green and lush. A few feet from the river, and in sight of the bridge, was such a lush area.

This may sound anti-social, but one of the greatest things about the river trip, was the complete lack of people. We were able to take our time, collect our thoughts and not have to worry about he odd jogger or kayaker.

So next time you’re bored and its cold, go the river. Actually scratch that, I don’t think I want company.