A Mighty Stream

Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I used to be a big walker. Not overweight, mind, though I was that too. Rather, I walked to and from my job each day—a total of between six and ten miles depending on the route I took and how late I thought I could be without earning a reprimand or a pink slip. When the pandemic took hold, I hauled the contents of my office back to my house and now I don’t have a good reason to walk. Oh sure, I could walk just to walk, but I never liked to do that. The journey is important; I get that, but without a destination I start to feel like an ant following her own pheromones in circles. It’s just how I am—If I’m not walking to work I’m walking somewhere to get a bite to eat. Sure, I’ve probably frittered away a dump truck full of money over the years collateral to walking, but it gets me out of the house. Or did. 

Faced with the extinction of my favorite pastime, I tried for a while to make perambulation a sort of game. My goal was to walk every street in my neighborhood of Ormewood Park. I kept a map with the routes I’d covered marked in red, and each morning I would review it and decide on a plan of action. I’ve lived here for eleven years, so the majority of the roads in the neighborhood’s square mile compass were familiar to me, though, again, only those that led somewhere else. The rest, probably around two fifths, may as well have been in France. 

If you’re the sort of person who looks for silver linings in a world-historic catastrophe, here’s a pretty original one: Thanks to Covid-19, I discovered a 1911 replica of the cottage of Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet and author of, among other things, Auld Lang Syne, barely half a mile from my front door. I could walk there faster than you could take a shower, unless you skipped your pits. 

So maybe that’s more of a bronze lining, especially since I can’t get in to look around without becoming a member of the Burns Club. But I found something else, even closer to my house. A mere 600 yards to my south, past a tiny muscadine vineyard and a derelict basketball court there’s a small path that leads down to a narrow grassy strip alongside a three-quarters buried concrete culvert. The culvert contains what may or may not be called Stockade Creek (it’s very hard to find definitive information about waterways you could recreate with a garden hose), which funnels stormwater into Intrenchment Creek, and thence to the South River, which dumps into the Ocmulgee southeast of the city, which in its turn pours into the Altahama about two-thirds of the way to Jacksonville, Florida. The Altahama spills its water into the Atlantic Ocean. That’s quite a journey, but here it’s just some muddy water in a tube. 

The culvert

The land through which the culvert passes, formerly a piece of the now long-gone Mansour Farm, was granted to a 501c(3) group called Focused Community Strategies around 1986, and a mix of market and affordable housing was built along the eastern edge. The western edge, descending to the culvert and the tiny intermittent stream (which we’ll pretend is definitely called Tapestry Creek) that runs for 300 yards alongside it, was held more or less in common, or perhaps ignored in common, as it was kudzu-choked and trash-strewn until the city undertook a sewer separation project fifteen years ago. At this point neighbors banded together to restore the land, planting a band of hardwoods and a band of meadows, and striving to remove invasive plants. Further south and east a community garden was started, supplying fresh produce to the Atlanta Community Food Bank. [1]

And so it went until 2014, when a couple of civic-minded beavers showed up and dammed up Tapestry Creek, slowing its drainage beneath Union (formerly Confederate) Avenue to the south. The beavers built themselves a cozy lodge a little ways upstream from the dam, and they’re probably in there binge-watching whatever it is beavers binge-watch when humans aren’t around. Meanwhile, Tapestry Creek exploded with life.

The beaver lodge

The first day my wife and I strolled through the place—let’s just get the nomenclature out of the way, shall we? There’s a sign that calls it Stockade Creek and Riparian Zone Restoration, which is eleven syllables long and contains a word that everyone will have to look up. Somewhere I got the idea that there was a sign that called it a “refuge,” and I’m totally on board for that. So the choices, it seems to me are Stockade Wildlife Refuge or Tapestry Wildlife Refuge. Stockade is a grotesque word, so let’s go with Tapestry. Let’s go one step further and abbreviate it to Tapestry Refuge. Short, memorable, and rather poetic. 

Ok, so the first day Katherine and I strolled through Tapestry Refuge, we saw a beaver. Just one—a slick little brown head powering upstream like a meatloaf with an outboard engine. It swam a little ways up the creek and took an exit into the bushes on the other side. We’ve never seen either of them again. 

We also saw a pair of Canadian geese together with their fuzzy goslings, drifting effortlessly across the water’s surface like clouds. Geese are wonderful upon the eye but complete buttholes, and though on this first visit they were out in the water and not paying much attention to us, they have subsequently found every opportunity to stand athwart the culvert and stare daggers at us. A family of wood ducks were about, carving a serpentine path across the water, the young ones occasionally spiraling out for room to tip over ludicrously, ninety degrees forward on an invisible axis across their bodies, head down and black feet flapping awkwardly aloft. We’ve seen them often since, along with the occasional mallard interloper. 

On the edge of the water, where it laps up against the pitted, brown-gray concrete, gathered a Covid-silent chorus of tadpoles, fat almond-shaped shadows in the water, the long tail edged—dorsally and ventrally—with umbrella ribs webbed with waving gossamer. Over the course of the spring these began to sprout legs, which is a hell of a thing to do, and gradually vanished into the hidden mystery of transformation, to reappear later as the deep, coarse hubbub of flatulence in the reeds, in the gloaming.

Turtles we have seen in their masses, like the helmets of doughboys from the Great War, popping up just above the trench preparatory to going over the top. Several disappear into the water as we approach—sniped!

Or perhaps that’s just my anxiety speaking. The brave ones don’t flinch. They stand with that sort of erectness only turtles can manage, back legs slightly bent, front legs locked, body tilted back five degrees or so, neck extended full length, head tilted up, aluminum foil reflector propped beneath the chin. You really want to walk up to these creatures and ask them if they’d like you to rub tanning oil on their backs. 

So you see, it’s a refuge for all animals, including your dear author here. The best thing about watching all these creatures do their thing is their absolute unconcern for us and our ridiculous, forehead-smacking, historically-derivative problems. Animals may not get to make music or read literature, but they are blessed with the absence of history, preventing the dumbest among them from trying to duplicate the actions of the dumbest people 87 years ago or 159 years ago or 1966 years ago. We are motivated by the ideals of service and justice and freedom, which are noble, but we’re cursed to live with the reality of corruption, greed, and sheer malevolence. Not to say they aren’t subject to our conflicted dominion, but they keep food and sleep and sex foremost in their minds and seem if not happy at least engrossed. 

I guess we can’t have everything. But it sure is nice to go out there and forget the maddening world. 

This thin ribbon of water is a vein, feeding an elongated oval of living green fabric and attracting the attention of a pantheon of varied creatures to settle and make their homes there. Unfortunately some jackass thought it would make a good border too. On the far side of the waterway there is a chain link fence, and behind that is Trestletree Village South.

Trestletree Village is a pair of Section 8 apartment complexes run by a company called Monroe Group, based in Denver, Colorado. Each complex consists of thirty-odd brick apartment buildings; no frills: rectangles with gray shingled roofs; four apartments per building (eight for those buildings with two floors), each apartment with a plain white door and a couple of small windows. The collective effect is unlovely, but four solid walls and a roof represent a tremendous improvement over, say, living in a cardboard box beneath an overpass. I don’t have any personal animus against the Monroe folks—if their marketing is to be believed, they’re a low-key operation with a commitment to helping people that have gotten tangled up in the gears of life. The Trestletree tenants’ association is not so charitable toward them, however, noting that groups aiming to assist residents have been marked by Monroe Group as criminal trespassers. I’m instinctively inclined to believe tenants over management, but for the moment let’s put aside their disputes to address a specific complaint in which I have a share, the resolution of which would go a long way to solving other, ancillary problems. To that end, forthwith I dispatch this strongly worded letter. [2]

Trestletree South, beyond Tapestry Creek

The fence tells the whole story. Trestletree inhabitants are physically separated from the rest of us not just by the fence (which, it should be noted, bars said inhabitants from enjoying Tapestry Refuge directly), but by the creek itself. Whatever the intentions of Monroe Group or whoever built the place initially, the result is segregation. Ormewood Park is fairly mixed racially, though it’s definitely getting whiter as the big development money sniffs future profits from the Southeast BeltLine. [3] In Trestletree, however, I’ve never seen a white face. 

Other than my own. I’ve been known to walk through Trestletree North now and then, because a) it’s a shortcut, and b) I’m just stupid enough to think that a burly white guy with a bushy beard and a ballcap is the perfect ambassador to carry out the project of drawing the neighborhood together by casually ignoring fences. Unsurprisingly this hasn’t really worked.

So I reached out to the wonderfully named Miracle Fletcher, a representative of the tenants' association, to ask her what she thought of the de facto border wall. She responded eloquently:

There are so many different ways to categorize the separation that most tenants feel living within the bars of Trestletree Villages Apartments. The fence is the representation in a physical form of all the things that have our communities divided. These things can range from economic status, race and religious beliefs. The tenants of Trestletree live in this same community of [Ormewood Park] but are isolated from the community. Removing this […] fence will allow the tenants to be included in the BeltLine project and would allow the children within the community to take part in experiencing the beauty of nature that is in their backyard. It is a silent matter that has never been fully addressed publicly and it’s time for Change. Our children need to be able to grow and flourish in an environment that decreases anxiety. The fence has the opposite effect; instead they are reduced and have limited access to the benefits that the creek would be able to offer. There are so many ways this small piece of nature can contribute to the health and well-being of our community. The tenants are standing in unity to advocate for our rights to have suitable living conditions without fear of retaliation from management. The fence is symbolic of the struggles that low-income families face daily. Remove the fence and bridge the gap. We are one community and isolation is not the answer.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Directly across the stream, fairly equidistant from the beaver lodge, are several “Charis houses”—built by Charis Community Housing to provide affordable homes—interspersed with regular market housing. The beneficiaries of Charis’ work are fully integrated into the neighborhood, and their properties back directly onto the refuge—they’re not excluded from its many charms. It’s a place where the deep wound that America suffered in utero has actually healed. There are scars still, but the limb is hale.

It’s ironic that the same waters that knit the eastern residents together should serve to keep the western residents apart. More ironic still that the waterway thus leveraged is a tributary to Intrenchment Creek. Intrenchment is, after all, a fairly loaded word. Racism is intrenched; inequality is intrenched; separate but equal is intrenched. You never hear about anything good being intrenched. Ice cream is not intrenched.

It is, frankly, almost too on-the-nose to be a useful metaphor. But I didn’t make it up. It is what it is; it is what it was before I was born and it is loathe to be anything else. So let’s run with it. 

Stasis is unnatural—like the flow of water, the flow of culture tends over time to wash away things that are antithetical to what people value most. Consider two variations of the well-known Biblical passage wielded with such great rhetorical effect by Martin Luther King:

Amos 5:24, King James Version: But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Amos 5:24, American Standard Version: But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

The difference is surprisingly sharp (at least to the secular eye), between the paternalistic idea of judgement and the universal idea of justice, and reflects brightly the political evolution from theocentric, monarchical seventeenth-century England to humanistic, democratic (relatively speaking) twentieth-century America. [4] In the latter translation, King found a weapon to combat the forces that separated Blacks from the rest of America half a century ago—an impersonal force that would sweep away the toxins of segregation with the unquestionable, inexorable will of Nature. The King James verse would have been less useful, but it would seem the arc of history really does bend toward justice. All things grow and change, or die. James’ predecessor King Canute understood the unmatched regency of Nature six hundred years earlier when he showed his courtiers his powers did not extend to stopping the tide. The mighty stream chips away, undercutting towering cliffs and regimes alike, softening even high mountain peaks with infinite patience and incontrovertible righteousness. 

Tapestry Creek is small and slow-flowing, but as François Rabelais wrote, “Time ripens all things.” The fence won’t last, and the ideology it articulates is likewise doomed. In time it will be gone, and there will be no distinction between the people living on either side of the stream, just as there is currently no distinction in the eyes of the beavers, the turtles, the geese, the ducks, or the frogs. 

Thanks as always for reading. I’d long planned this subject as a refuge from the growing tension of the looming election, and I hope you will accept it in the spirit in which it is given. Rest well tonight and fight again tomorrow.

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[1] Special thanks to Mike McCord for giving me a tour of the refuge, complete with historical commentary. Bonus fact: Mike used to be the caretaker for the Burns Cottage. What are the odds?

[2]  My son Satchel told me I should be a superhero with the ability to write strongly worded letters. 

[3]  The Beltline is the giant sidewalk Atlanta squeezed out of Ryan Gravel’s much better idea to build a multimodal circuit—foot, bike, and train—around the city in order to patch together the crazy quilt of neighborhoods separated from one another by seething freeways boiling with enraged, tailgating maniacs.

[4] I had two interesting conversations on this subject, one with my minister-poet friend Jason Myers, who told me—if I may paraphrase the living daylights out of his words—that the over most of its history, Christianity has viewed God’s judgement as the source of justice, and he speculated that the growth of secularization gave rise to the preference for the latter term as one bearing greater appeal to those who did not have a connection to this eschatology. [5]

Later I received a message from Robert Alter, a prominent scholar of Hebrew and comparative literature at UC Berkeley. Alter told me, “The Hebrew word mishpat can mean either justice or judgment, and it certainly means the former in this verse, given the parallelism with ‘righteousness.’ My own guess is that the prevalent Christian conception of the Old Testament God as a god of wrath led to the choice of ‘judgment.’”

The observations of these two line up nicely with my thesis—“judgement” selected by Christian translators seeking to undergird the power of kings, then later reverting to “justice”—the meaning perhaps originally intended—as the concerns of the unwashed masses rose to prominence.

[5] I wish I could take credit for this kick-ass word, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to use it were I given a million years to give it a think. I simply plucked it out of Jason’s response to my questions.