Reflections
on Ellerbe Creek and the Watershed

A place like Ellerbe Creek can inspire the artist in us all.  We may be moved paint, sketch, write, photograph, or otherwise capture some aspect of the creek and its environs.  If you would like to use this page to share your personal vision of Ellerbe Creek just contact us.

Eyes Wide Open

by Kim Curtis


Not far from my house, in the heart of one of Durham’s older neighborhoods, is pearl mill branch. Its headwaters are nearby, and a mile or so downstream it joins Ellerbe Creek, the main waterway flowing through the city.

When I first discovered pearl mill branch, I knew little about it. A lover of nature but no naturalist, for years I walked or biked along the paved trail that follows its course, cocooned in ignorance.

This ignorance was blissful. My heart pumped at the sheer existence of the creek: I delighted, conspiratorily, in the way it forced itself - a small green concession - from the urban maw. Blessed be the waters, I sang as I meandered along its sides. And blessed too the contours of the land that bend the waters letting them flow, gurgle, and catch the light. And forget not the green jungle that tangles and thrives along its banks. Such was my gratitude for this little fragment of pulsating life: sweet, a little comic, but straight and true.

In this tiny stretch of urban wild I received shelter from the whirl of sounds, projects and problems that beset human culture. There I experienced what philosopher Erazim Kohak calls “the dimension of eternity”: that sense neither proposition, doctrine nor dogma can impart, that Being is primary and good. That it is a gift. There, along the branch, no matter my despair or doubt, I could count on the presence of the holy; my senses received that moral feeling for creation: that it is worthy, intrinsically, of being cherished. As I walked, praising the water, so much liquid myself, my sense of belonging swelled.

Like all urban streams, this one too receives our culture’s refuse: balls, fast food cartons, beer cans, stolen bicycles too worn to sell, plastic bags – all adorn it, and walking along it the smell of sewage is not uncommon.

Yet these things did not much interfere with my communion. Once when my father was visiting, we walked together along the branch. It was a wet fall day and, simultaneously, we caught the movement of a huge barred owl through the trees. Although it vanished at once, we were elated by the apparition. Now that my father has passed away, disappearing into the mystery himself, I take solace from the privilege of this bird’s visitation. Its fleeting magnificence helps me transform my feelings of loss into thanks for the gift of my father’s life. It is as if our delighted response to the owl that day was rewarded, redounding generously outward, spilling over - like molten gold.

In this small oasis the miracle presence of the natural world – its forces, rhythms, intricate beauty, and our kinship with it struck me over and over again. What greater purpose for our species than to worship these watery creeks and humble branches, to venerate terrestrial contour, vine, tree, bush, bird and flower?

And so, in innocent wonder, for years I praised and blessed this pearly branch, grateful for the sense of eternity I found in all that strives along it.

~ ~ ~

But lately things have changed. It’s not that my walks have ceased to restore or delight. But it is different now. Spirit has become more fleshly. The old dimension of the eternal – still perhaps available in that cool, thick green – is complicated by knowledge. I have experienced the Fall. The place where I once bore witness to primordial life has become a book whose pages demand new literacy. This nature has a history linked essentially and intricately with human community. The metaphorical wall over which once I stepped with a sigh of relief has vanished, as if, never quite real, it was a sort of idol. Spirit made flesh. I take to this book like a scholar on novel terrain.

I have learned that this is an impoverished place biologically speaking. Where once I saw teeming diverse flora, I now recognize a handful of dominant invasive species: Japanese and Chinese privet, thorny olive, Japanese honeysuckle, multiflora rose, Japanese stiltgrass. Brought to this rapidly urbanizing region of the world in the second half of the 19th century, most were plants of distinction for the rising middle and upper classes. Privet’s principle use, for example, was for privacy fences. Now, having escaped domestication, these species have taken root in uncultivated places all over the Southeast. Some have immigrated and spread in surprising ways. Japanese stiltgrass was used to pack China’s porcelain, an item bound for the rich. Stiltgrass itself, however, has proved far more democratic and egalitarian, much to the chagrin of ecologists. All these exotic species are choking out native flora, outcompeting them for light, nutrients, and space.

As I walk along the branch, I now realize, to borrow a concept from Aldo Leopold, how low my “floristic standard of living,” actually is.

The consequences of this poverty are far greater than it may appear at first glance. Some ecologists cuttingly refer to species such as these as “biological pollution”. Take the case of privet. A prolific producer, its seeds become food for many kinds of birds. Yet, these “berry-like dupes” are low in lipids and a notoriously poor source of nutrition. Feasted on, the berries are carried far and wide by many species of birds. Once established, the plants beat out more nutritious berry-producing natives, alter hydrological patterns, soil chemistry, and fire regimes, and disrupt native plant and animal associations including pollination and seed dispersal. Privet is everywhere along the branch. It chokes the earth. That constriction is palpable to me now – and fearful.

Study has also taught me that what is available to thrill the ears is poorer too. This is floodplain, and there is habitat enough to support frogs. But because the creek is heavily polluted from run-off from the city’s roads with their high level of metals and organic chemicals, the insects frogs depend on are simply not able to live there. Studies show a sharp drop in the diversity of insect populations as the amount of impervious cover in an urbanizing watershed passes 10 or 15%. Ellerbe Creek’s watershed is 22%. No spring peepers’ crazy joy here.

This new literacy has altered my experience of so much along the creek. Trees that once brought simple pleasure now bring sadness. The five or six young bald cypress that line one section of the creek were planted. I have always known that. Having recently walked here with a naturalist, however, today I wonder if they were not planted by some reverent soul in tribute to the bird, now extinct, responsible for the scattered wild cypress presence this far north. For centuries and more, the Carolina parrot feasted on cypress further south where the trees thrive. Then, winging north, flocks of parrots inadvertently deposited cypress seeds in the piedmont. The parrots were hunted to extinction some time between 1914 and 1930, so any young cypresses we see today can only be the work of melancholy human hands. Such are the jewels my scholarly endeavors unearth.

How changed is my experience now of walking along the creek. What I see actually looks less beautiful. Its not that I despise the invading flora, but neither can I lose myself in it as before. Knowing what I know, its sheer exuberant force no longer offers the same sustenance, delight or kinship, no longer easily opens out onto an experience of the eternal. Likewise, the scented waves of honeysuckle, wisteria and rose that once wooed me so passionately, now make me stiffen and feel confused, mind at war with senses. And trees bring on melancholia while my ears carry news of empty silence. My whole aesthetic experience has changed, tinged with grief-wizened knowledge. The spiritual consequences seem grim and just as altered. How much knowledge shapes feeling, structures and guides senses, nourishes or impoverishes the spirit.

Is this saturated sadness all that remains of my earlier bliss? This cannot be. If it were, I would be overcome with nostalgia, and I am not. Still, the old experience of this place is certainly no longer available. How to belong to this fallen branch? How to recover the experience of the eternal as I stand face to face with privet or with ghosts of the vanished parrot? How to recover what Kohak calls, “the pervading presence of the holy” in the midst of so much that is not good, so much loss and careless destruction, so much history?

These are essentially questions of the spirit, religious questions. They are ancient ones for our rapacious species, although the conditions under which we pose them are uniquely ominous. Biologists estimate that today Earth’s rate of species extinction is on the order of 30,000 species per year. And despite some individual species’ successes, no trends concerning biological diversity are encouraging.

The facts are crushing. Yet the nature of the spiritual problem is not only depression produced of the tree of knowledge. Indeed it is not even primarily this. As Leopold put the issue, “We grieve only for what we know.” Our spiritual problem is that we are in a state of giddy ignorance and denial. So, while most biologists believe we are in the midst of the most rapid mass extinction of living things in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, and that this is mainly a result of human activity, the general public is largely unaware of both the loss of species and of the threat it poses. Too many don’t even know the scientific facts over which the spirit might grieve.

What of other, nonscientific ways of knowing about species extinction? What, for example, of experience-based knowledge? High rates of mobility have detached us from rootedness to place. Every year in the United States about 40 million people move. Nearly half of these make moves of substantial distance. Mobility of this kind thwarts accrual of knowledge that might otherwise be passed down from generation to generation, including vital observations of changes in the natural world. Moreover, it severs what can be an important connection between delight in and care for a particular landscape and a hunger for knowledge.

Our use relations to the natural world have also changed, affecting the knowledge we have. Industrial production of food and medicines has removed us from use-based connection to life around us. To be sure there are a few individuals who still gather and know the uses of native plants – several elderly African Americans still collect pokeweed along the Ellerbe, harvesting its new growth, like asparagus, in spring, and boiling it to remove the poisons, after which it makes a tasty poke salad. But such knowledge and the care that accompanies it are rare.


A branch of “the ditch” circa 1940

Moreover, this kind of connection to the natural world has been attenuated for a long time. Soon after the region became a center for textile production over a hundred years ago, the Ellerbe was called “the ditch”. Not only did it earn this lovely name because it was channelized, but because it was the favored recipient of industrial effluvia from the textile mills that flanked its banks. Older residents tell of the warm, soapy effluent that went straight into the creek, turning it one day green, the next day blue. Pearl Mill was no different. Mill workers and any other residents would have been hard pressed to turn to these waters for respite or for knowledge of the intricacies of nature’s life and possible human uses.

The legacy today is that most people in the neighborhood don’t know that the Ellerbe is one of the state’s most polluted creeks, daily delivering a heavy payload of pollutants into Falls Lake – drinking water for neighbors downstream in the state’s capitol. Most don’t even know its name. Those who do, use it for recreation - the dominant use-relation outside of drinking. And most of these enjoy its beauty, as did I for so long, in blissful ignorance.

~ ~ ~

This blissful ignorance looks disastrous to me now. Anthropologists tell us that worship is the most persistent distinctive trait of our species, and certainly this is a form of worship. But divorced from real knowledge of the lives and the fate of beings all around us, it seems a fool’s form. Yet, this new knowledge lies so heavy upon my heart. I struggle with depression, feelings of disgust for our species, and with despair. Alternatively, I am gripped by an overweening sense of responsibility for saving the planet that exhausts and threatens my spirit with its tyrannical will to fix. In the face of such choices, the songs of the sirens - ignorance and forgetfulness – charm and seduce.

On the horns of this dilemma, I return to the questions: how to belong, eyes wide open, to this fallen branch, to this so compromised nature? How to recover the experience of the holy, that sense, so necessary to well being, that Being is primary and good?

My own answers begin with kinship. As much as I, these plants, this landscape, even this water’s flow have historicity etched in their veins, their rocks, and their movement. As much as I grieve for nature’s brokenness along the Branch, I recall that I too am an invasive, that my people rode the waves of territorial dominion that broke the backs of native cultures. There is kinship in these broken histories, recognition of which, as I grieve for them, steadies my gaze upon the world I must accept.

And yet, no more than I, is nature ever wholly defined, ever wholly contained by this historicity. As I am free to resist my peoples’ and my species’ dark and rapacious history and the seduction of ignoring it, so nature – impoverished, threatened and suffering great loss, has its own capacities for freedom. Transcendence abides in us both: light from afar still filters, glows, and alters through day and into night, following the great cosmic rhythms – lunar phases, earthly rotations, solar radiance. And you and I are still capable of receiving these elemental gifts, even along our history-drenched branches. We belong to these miraculous experiences of the everyday, we are fitted for them. With lovely simplicity, Thoreau expressed it this way, “Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”

The bliss I have experienced along the branch is not in itself disastrous. It is a response to this transcendence and an expression of kinship and communion, a form of worship. The attachment it brings – the sense of value and goodness – is the foundation for moral feeling for the nonhuman world.

Moral feeling, however, is adrift without facts and knowledge that link it to our historical moment. And despite the news science brings almost daily of the assault we have launched against planetary life (E. O. Wilson call us “the planetary killers”), knowledge brings not only sadness. From it comes transcendence too. Evidence of the awesome power of life abounds. For example, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently revised upwards their estimate of the number of bacterial species in a thimbleful of unpolluted soil – from 10,000 to 1 million. Or think of the extraordinary opportunistic adaptations of species to unlikely human places. Florida is home to a rare and endangered species of crocodile that ranges down to tropical South America. The best place to spot this cool reptile in the United States is at Turkey Point power plant in Miami where a large, healthy and vigorously breeding population has found suitable habitat in the 6,000 acres of canals Florida Power & Light Company constructed to cool its effluent. Company employed biologists now study and monitor this serendipitous development. Closer at hand, I think too of what a naturalist taught me to see near the Ellerbe: small swatch-like remnants of the once expansive prairie land still miraculously rich in prairie grasses and flowers. The ability of these species to survive the plow, pesticides and roads is remarkable enough. But most remarkable is the way they have adapted to the loss of natural fires once vital to their survival. Now instead of fires it is the yearly mowing under power lines and along roads that nourishes these prairie remnants. In this odd conjunction of inadvertent human action and biological adaptation we see, indeed, the actuality of transcendence and the promise of life.

Both experience and knowledge, then, can inspire worship, restoring the spirit even in these dark times. To walk along the branch bathed in light from afar, aware of the astounding life under my feet and of the tenacious opportunism of living species is to feel the exhilaration of possibility as I move, eyes wide open, senses receiving news of extinction and threat.

~ ~ ~

I no longer go to pearl mill branch to escape the world. I refuse nature-as-blissful-refuge, nature-as-getaway-that-renews-the-world-weary-spirit. I do not seek out experience there that lets me return, refreshed, to endure the world a bit longer. In fact, I no longer divide the world like that. It’s all messier now. Today more than ever to worship and to cherish requires, as ecologist Michael Rosenzweig argues, that we live out the ancient command Noah heard from on high, “keep alive with you”. It requires seeing nature not as something pristine out there, but as in our midst: in our backyards, front yards, cemeteries, parks, urban creeks, cities and even in our power plants. “To keep alive with you” is to undertake the redemptive work of reconciliation: reconciliation of spirit and flesh, of human use and that of other species, of spiritual bliss and scientific knowledge. It is this work of “keeping alive with us”, of sustaining kinship that today promises spiritual rejuvenation.

Although I myself have come lately to it, this spirit of reconciliation is mightily at work in places along the Ellerbe. Hundreds of neighbors over the years have spent countless hours pulling privet, hacking olive, and smothering gargantuan wisteria vines with cardboard and yards and yards of discarded rugs, patiently waiting as the planet completed a full orbit, time enough for darkness to sap this species’ tenacious energy. Others have painstakingly saved native plants from threatened areas, planting and nurturing them along the creek. Newly created wetlands filter pollution, provide habitat, nurture biodiversity and raise the spirits of those who pass by. Meander has been restored in stretches. Teachers bring their children to this beautiful outdoor classroom where they learn about the intricate web of life and the destructive and redemptive choices before us.


Dreams are nourished here – of making the creek a place of constant surprise and learning, a place where ignorance need not be the price of bliss nor bliss the sacrificial lamb of knowledge. Here, for example, signs might appear from one day to the next – on one, hung near a path, a tree might tell about itself and about the owl that sometimes perches in its branches. Another might tell the story of plants rescued from a prairie remnant about to be bulldozed to make way for roads: which insects suck their nectar, which mammals live by their young shoots, what they need to survive. Another might tell of the dangers faced by the rare Lewis’ Heartleaf from the burgeoning human population consuming its native habitat. Yet another might identify a place where the endangered Smooth Coneflower could thrive again, properly nurtured. Still another might help neighbors dream of supporting a rare species of dragonfly through a chain of backyard gardens and ponds that could form a saving stretch of habitat across the city. And this may in turn stimulate others to dream of how these waterways might become places of social communion in a divided city.

These signs and the work they chronicle speak of potential loss and possible redemption, making the creek a place of constant encounter, surprise, sober reflection, and possibility. A nature trail takes us into the thick of the forest where a long-junked jalopy humorously stands watch over a recently restored wetland, lush with greens. Great chunks of cement mark the trail offering characteristically 21st century urban perches for repose in nature. In this little slip of urban wild I see the work of reconciliation before us: a great unpristine collaboration. Here, bliss mingles with knowledge, and I sense the pervading presence of the holy, eyes wide open.

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