The Rivanna Rambler

This show originally aired on December 27, 2007 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

It is that still time of the human winter: the lull between Christmas and New Years. In the early morning, I walk the hills of my neighborhood before the sun has fully risen past houses that are still buttoned up at 7 am. Behind closed doors, I imagine parents sleeping in, pancake breakfasts leisurely consumed in pajamas, kids getting to know their Christmas gifts. Housecats are perched at windows awaiting the return of their owners from holiday trips.

I live in Rugby Hills on the side that slopes down towards the 250 By-pass through the Greenleaf neighborhood. The high point is the ridge that Rugby Road traverses. The water from our hilly yards and streets gathers into backyard creeks that collect into a tributary that flows through a culvert under the Bypass towards Charlottesville High and McIntire Park and then into Meadow Creek. Walking the neighborhood at this time of year, I can easily scan through the bare trees across the small valleys between the streets that mark the original creases in the land.

At this hour, the streets are empty, but it is anything but quiet. From the first startled flutter of wings from the privet alongside our house as I open my front door, to the enveloping hue and cry coming from the hundreds of birds in the tall tuliptrees in our backyard, I am in the midst of a winter flock of American robins awakening from their scattered roosts in our neighborhood. They arrived, suddenly it seemed, a few weeks ago and now are part of our urban landscape, departing each morning for unkown foraging fields, in the rushing of wings that sounds like the air itself is breathing. At dusk, they return in waves for a half hour air show as they turn by the hundreds in an ever-changing Mobious strip flexing across the sky, contained and transformed by invisible elastic forces of instinct and safety in numbers.

As I walk down Cambridge Circle, the sun is rising over the Southwest Mountains and lighting the seedpods of the high branches of the tulip trees, salmon and pink like a muted outdoor Christmas display. I hear the kewing cry of our neighborhood sharp shinned hawk from its perch uphill and then, as bands of departing robins fly east towards open fields and pastures, the hawk crosses the street directly in front of me in a low swooping arc that rises towards its moving target. If there is an intersection of flight paths, I am not able to see it through the branches that layer in dense patterns against the warming sky.

I stand in the middle of the quiet street, watching the movement of life in unceasing waves of birds. Though this is my neighborhood, I am reminded of how little I really see until I stop like this – and also , with my neck tilted back for what seems like minutes of observation, how little I really know. Perhaps the resulting dizziness is an appropriate response to seeing birds numbering in the thousands headed out on a winter morning.

There is something just right about looking up at this time of the year – whether during the decent of darkness at dusk, or in the morning, like this, as the light silhouettes the shapes of the trees and houses before daylight colors them in. Looking towards the heavens, I have seen thousands of flocking birds, a vastness even by today’s standards – and one which helps remind me of my place in the neighborhood that I share with all kinds of neighborhoods. I think that this is, perhaps, a very good way to enter the New Year.

This show originally aired on December 20, 2007 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

We are approaching the shortest day of the year. Looking for a local hike, we head out towards Monticello to the Saunders Trail, the 2 mile trail that winds up the side of Carter’s Mountain to the entrance of Monticello. It is a blustery day worthy of being called winter – and the parking lot on Route 53 is barely full. We don fleece jackets and gloves and head out for our first time on the trail, already well-known to locals, birders, and visitors. That we are in for a treat is immediately apparent as we start up the comfortably wide trail.

With a grade no greater than 5% so that it suits walkers, wheelchairs, and bikes, this is a budding naturalist’s dream – almost every shrub and tree is labeled with common and scientific name, and if it weren’t so cold, we might linger even longer over the varieties.As we ascend, the wind becomes the dominant – but invisible - character in the forest, chilling the air that falls into shadow behind Carter’s Mountain. We’d seen and felt it as we left our house in Charlottesville, whipping the tulip trees high above, reminding us of days on the water. But here, the gusts over the top of the mountain crescendo into a roar, sending twigs and small branches down onto the rock dust path. As we approach the boardwalk that carries us into the woods and above the steep grades of the forest floor, the sound of the wind easily masks any noise from cars on Route 53 below. It is thrilling, cold, and somewhat scary.

On the water, a common way for designating wind speed is the Beaufort Scale, named for Admiral Beaufort of the Royal Navy, whose method that linked wind speed with the number of sails a ship could carry, was formalized in 1830. As sailing vessels became more sophisticated, the system evolved to use the wind effects of the on the surface of the water to estimate speed in levels called Force 1, 2, and so on up to Force 12 – a hurricane. Later still, descriptions were added to describe the effects of wind as seen on land: for example, Force 6 is a strong breeze, equivalent to 27 mph and causing large waves with foam crests and some spray to build on the sea. The equivalent on land puts large branches in motion, causes wires overhead to whistle, and makes using an umbrella difficult.

But wind speed is hard to estimate without a lot of experience and instrumentation to corroborate. The noise and the motion of the tree canopy above provide clues, though the wind is broken by the mountain into turbulent downdrafts. I guess that it is gusting to at least 40 mph – Force 8 on the Beaufort Scale – gale force winds that, on land, the Beaufort scale says will beak twigs from trees and cause cars to veer on the road.The boardwalk carries us above the folds of the mountain gathering the waters that will descend eventually into Moores Creek on the other side of I-64. Up the hillside, I hear the crack of wood that continues for several seconds as a limb collides with a tree in the slow, inevitable explosion of descent. Closer to me, a tree that fell many months or years ago is splayed out upon the leaf littered slope, decomposing into segments like the joints of the fingers.

Wind is a primary erosive force on beaches and rock faces, joining with water to transform solids into sediments. On the fetch of open water, wind continually creates the rise and fall of waves in motion towards the shore. Later I learn from the National Weather Surface Charlottesville winds were measured at 29 mph with gusts to 47 mph. But regardless of the number, I left with the descriptive scale for inland wind that moves over the tree tops and through the canopy in turbulent eddies: rustling leaves, breaking twigs and branches, and in the strongest of winds, uprooting trees, hastening the recycling of nutrients from branch to soil in a sea of trees.

Photo credit: Hank Hellman

 

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It is an early December afternoon, unseasonably warm. The slant of sun at two o’clock conveys the certain message that within a couple of hours, the sun will fall off the edge of the earth, leaving us in the cold and darkness of another winter night. I am on the County side of the river, below Pantops, on the Old Mill Trail, named with a nod to the grain mills that once lined this stretch of the Rivanna in the 17 and early 1800’s. When completed, it will terminate at Milton, but here it is a wide “Class A” trail, suitable for wheelchairs, bikes, and older folks who need a firm and clear footing.

The path has been bush-hogged clear of excess brush and bramble, and a thin layer of rock-duct paving shows boot prints and various scuff marks left behind by human and non-human travelers along the river corridor. Here and there, semi-translucent tree tubes, four feet high and staked in place, reveal where young cedars and oak trees have been planted to help restore what was removed to make way for the trail.

This swath of green is what is called a “riparian buffer” … “riparian” for river; buffer for the fact that it is a protective transition zone between civilization and the river in its normal flow within its banks. The river’s buffer is often the same as its floodplain, as it ishere, a broad expanse of sand deposited in the slow curve of the river. Federal and state regulations and county code all protect this buffer and ensure that there is little or no disturbance in what is called the floodplain overlay district.

But recreational uses are allowed, and there’s no keeping out the animals. Every hundred yards or so, placed neatly at the edge of the path, is a desiccated clump of scat, full of berries, left behind by fox or raccoon.

And everywhere, the sign of beaver … here, a series of tree stumps scraped to points like pencils, ragged with teeth marks and accompanied by piles of fresh wood chips on the ground. There are some random scrapes in the rock dust, where a beaver has pulled the trunk across the walking path towards the river making its own trail through bramble and woods and eventually to a steep earthen slide down to the water. One unlucky animal was forced to leave its quarry behind, the trunk left dangling a foot off the ground gripped by thorny greenbrier and bittersweet.

Apartment complexes have sprouted up all along the hillside overlooking the river in this part of the county, but today there is no one on the trail, so as I cross the simple bridges that ford the creeks flowing into the Rivanna along this stretch, I am left to a quiet that is punctuated only now and again by the sounds of hikers on the other side of the river at Riverview Park and the faint gush of the river itself tumbling on down towards the Bay.

Well before I reach the remains of the Woolen Mills dam, I turn back, watching for more signs. Bicycle tracks weaving figure eights in the soft gravel. A series long lines and crooked hieroglyphics dug into the rock dust have me mystified until I come upon a perfect circle, made by a kid – or young at heart – with a stick and the desire to leave a mark. Against a tree, there’s a stack of trash bags bulging with soda cans, fast food wrappers, plastic toys, leftover from a river clean-up, I suppose.

Though the urban trail system along the river is relatively tame, it still touches some deep and primal places within, where I can exercise my tracking sense, however dim and unskilled it may be, and where I can watch each season fold ever so gracefully into the next.

This show originally aired on December 6, 2007 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

 

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December 6, 2007

There’s a move afoot to extend Scenic River designation up past Woolen Mills– and the Department of Conservation and Recreation wants to see this stretch of the Rivanna from Charlottesville up to the South Fork Reservoir as part of a preliminary study. It seemed prudent to see if the low river water levels would permit such a trip, so a couple of weeks ago, we took an exploratory trip down the Rivanna.

State Scenic River designation was enacted in the early 1970s to provide a measure of protection for the rivers of Virginia. Minnie Lee and Harry McGehee from Fluvanna were largely responsible for establishing the Rivanna between Charlottesville and the James River as the first state scenic river in 1973. In 1988, the Moormans was also designated. Of the 505 designated miles in Virginia, the Rivanna now has 51 scenic river miles.

Scenic river designation constitutes official recognition of the river’s natural, scenic, historic, and recreational values. The designation doesn’t allow the state to control local land use – but does allow the locality to utilize the designation positively, and makes it more difficult to build dams along the given stretch.

We set up our shuttle, leaving one car at Riverview Park, and launch at the Route 29 bridge a half mile below the reservoir. We are pleasantly surprised that there seems to be enough water to paddle. Soon, the hum of Route 29 is in the distance, and we’re making our way past the SOCA fields on the left and Carrsbrook on the right. Within minutes, our first bald eagle of the day flies overhead and lands on a snag about 500 yards downstream. We float towards it, getting within 100 feet before it stretches its wings, drops slightly to gain lift and heads back upstream.

Both of us are scrambling to capture the bird on camera, but I am in conflict: should I go for the picture? Or trust my mind’s eye to capture the image that will reside along with all my other senses and build the sighting of this bird into a memory? The wind chill on our backs, with the noonday sun over the stern, low on its trajectory towards the shortest day. The canoe swinging under me in the slight current that draws us closer. My cold fingers blindly fumbling for my camera while I keep an eye on the bird as my heart accelerates. The browns and grays of trees on the bank. The leaves sailing down from tulip trees and sycamores onto the surface of the water.

Greedy, I try for the photo –– and the result is predictable: a large moving bird in a small frame against a clear blue sky that could be anywhere. I am left to wonder: what did I miss as I scrambled for the photo? I might have missed the shadow as the bird with wingspan of a fathom or more made its crossing to the other side above me. I might have missed clearly seeing its yellow legs, or its hooked beak, or the mud on its white breast, or the gleam in its eye. We paddle on – and not five minutes later, I see an immature bald, its dark plumage blending into the shadow on the bank. This time, I do not attempt a photo.

Sightings of bald eagles are common on the Rivanna – they are getting ready to nest this time of year, so perhaps our eagles today were part of the shuffle of territory. I have seen enough of the “scenic ” to last me the rest of the four hours of paddling down to Charlottesville – and I have claimed on photo my record of the bald eagle sighting. Though I support the scenic river extension, I am struck by the irony of our human need to capture memories, name places, and protect with awkward, but necessary, means the places that are special to us – and simply home to the wild things.