The Rivanna Rambler

April 10, 2008

 

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This show originally aired on April 10, 2008 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.

Photo of shadbush by Dudley Rochester.

This is one of those weeks that you can literally watch the hourly changes as spring bursts forth. It’s hard to know where to put your attention, amidst all the flowering trees – the dogwoods blooming on cue for the Festival, the audacious magenta flowering crabapple, redbud blossoms lining dark branches in perfect counterpoint, like tiny purple Christmas lights.

In this area, if spring seems to be moving too fast, you can always travel to a higher elevation and catch it again. If I were headed to the hills, the one tree I’d still be looking for is the serviceberry, whose white showy flowers have always been a reliable marker of spring, but pass so quickly that you may have only a few days before the wind snatches them from the bud and soft green leaves unfurl in their place.

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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.

November 8, 2007

A warm day on the river traveling to Rivanna Mills to sample for water quality provides the opportunity to reflect on the need for both the short and long view of changes in the watershed.

 

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There is something not altogether right about this day. Here it is, November 1st, and we should be bundled in fleece and wearing high rubber boots to venture out on the water. Instead, we’re wearing light rubber wading shoes that sink into the mud as we shove the canoe from the launch into the Rivanna at Hells Bend Farm, striving for a patch of water that will be deep enough to float the boat. Though the water is a cool 56 degrees, the air temperature is climbing past 65 as the sun arcs into the autumn afternoon. I’m not sure what doesn’t feel right: is it the air temperature — or the water level? — which is still near historic lows in spite of patches of rain we’ve had.

Headed downriver to sample for aquatic bugs for the StreamWatch volunteer program, we quickly learn that the shoals in the center extend almost entirely across the river. We snuggle up against the left bank, a vertical wall of dying asters and poison ivy, where a channel twice the width of the canoe is just deep enough to get a decent stroke.Rounding Hell’s Bend, we stick to the outside, but in the long straightaway below we have to shove our way to the other side, seeking a route through the shallows of coarse sand deposited as the water slowed and dropped its load after the last storm. The bottom is now being sculpted by the gentle flow into underwater ripples and bluffs much like the sharp relief of the winter beach is built by the tides and wind. The channels along the banks are a Piedmont version of aquamarine. The summer’s weed is gone, and everywhere, the water is clear enough to see to the bottom, where sunken leaves tumble and pile up against underwater tree limbs and rock outcroppings.

Once at the sampling site below the Mill, we get to work, scraping bugs from a shallow cobbled riffle into the mesh net and pouring over the contents with our middle aged eyes. We enter the world of macro – where everything of interest is small – one-eighth to as much as an inch long, like the fat, ribbed crane fly larvae that are in abundance today. We’ve also captured small pebbles, twigs, and leaves in various stages of decomposition – and from this tumble of browns and yellows, we must pick out the larvae of mayflies, water pennies, and caddisflies – as well as the tiny clams and snails and worms that inhabit the stream. Having sampled for a couple of years, we know that you look until you can’t find any more bugs, and then you look again, switch sides of the table and look some more, flip the net over and keep on looking, before you can have confidence that you’ve collected all the bugs in the net, which is necessary to assure quality data. While we pour over the net, the river tumbles over the stone from the old dam, the sound making it seem like a fuller river than it is.

By four o’clock, we’re winding down, just as the sky turns an ominous gray and the late afternoon sun catches clouds in curving lines stretched out in the wake the tropical depression, Noel. After pulling the canoe back up through the rapids to head home, I trip trying to step in the canoe and am suddenly on my butt in two feet of water that now feels plenty cool. The paddle back upstream is welcome and warming work.

At the far end of the long straight channel, the late afternoon sky is dense with clouds descending their dark on tawny yellow sycamores that flank the river. After straining to find the small bugs, it feels good to stretch my eyes into the distance. This is a good time of year to stay flexible and acknowledge what is. Though the Virginia autumn has been fickle with little water and overly-warm temperatures, what is just right is the slant of light — unmistakably autumn — soft but crisp, forcing one’s concentration on the essentials of life: food, shelter, and companionship. It is a good time to gather up, pick over, collect what is meaningful or needed, being sure not to waste or overlook anything important, while at the same time keeping the long view — which stretches out past the shorter days that are upon us – with a vision of another season to come.

South Fork Rivanna Reservoir
Credit: Hank Helman

October 4, 2007

Last night, after the last credits rolled on Ken Burns’ documentary,” The War,” the screen was filled with a series of film clips, along with the words, “this is yours.” It started with views of mountains, then the north rim of the Grand Canyon, then watersheds, then farm fields, and was spliced together with others showing people living, laughing, learning, playing … the background music was soothing and welcome after the raw footage and compelling stories of war. This end note, which was really an advertisement for PBS, was an invitation to think of what America or the United States really means to each of us … and what are we are willing to do protect that which we hold dear.

With these thoughts still fresh in my mind, I tried to put myself in the shoes of those in Albemarle County whose “property rights,” some feel, are being assailed by the latest round of amendments being proposed to the zoning, subdivision, and water protection ordinances of the County code. Each of the proposed amendments restricts in some way the right of a landowner to build; to subdivide; to disturb the land, remove trees, or gain access to those portions of his or her property that have slopes greater than 25%.

These hot-button items are going before the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, in a public hearing being held on Wednesday evening October 10. The amendments that are up for comment are described at the County’s Community Development web-site and are called critical slopes, safe and convenient public access, family subdivisions. Also, changes to the water protection ordinance will minimizing any land disturbing activities within 100 feet of streams in the County’s designated rural areas as well as the already protected watersheds that feed our drinking water supplies.

Feelings are running high about these restrictions –on either side you might sit on. The County, charged with protecting our natural resources, has proposed these amendments in order to limit the amount of sediment and pollution that enters our waterways and to preserve the vegetated buffers on our streams. The ecological benefits that result from keeping intact these riparian zones are well documented – cooler water, better habitat in and near the stream, better absorption of stormwater and runoff and the nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment they carry. The need to do so in the Rivanna watershed has never been greater with some 15 stream segments of the Rivanna now listed as impaired by Virginia DEQ.

Some landowners, especially those whose wealth is tied to the land, whether by inheritance or by speculation or investment, predictably do not welcome these restrictions. Others, driven by a sense of responsibility to protect the integrity of landscapes, while they may recognize an individual’s property rights, even their own, they are more accepting of the restrictions – even welcoming of them because they will slow the pace of development and help ensure some measure of protection for our waterways and land.

Like most zoning ordinances, these proposals are subject to exception either through grandfathered rights or by appealing – but they are an example of the County’s attempt to keep pace with other cities and counties in the Commonwealth that have upgraded their standards in accordance with the 2003 amendments to Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act. The Act outlines how property owners in the tidewater regions of Virginia are restricted for the common good of protecting and restoring water quality in the Bay. In 1991, Albemarle became the first non-Tidewater county to voluntarily adopt this guidance. Our existing restrictions protect over 1000 stream miles and 25,000 acres of land in the County. The proposed restrictions will increase protections by over a third again. This latest amendment is simply an update.

But it is not simple. Even a cursory review of the ordinance itself reveals the complexities of attempting to be fair, to reduce the impact on landowners while affording the strongest measure of protection of the streams in question and thus our collective water supply, our rural areas, our landscapes. While our population continues to grow, our human needs for space and for wild places and for unobstructed views remain … and these are our collective needs that transcend boundaries, just as much as an aquatic system needs a minimum of protection to survive, let alone thrive.

So the caption repeated on the television screen bears thinking about. This is ours. Would that we could find a way to help everyone who owns lands with the incentives, the tools, and the inspiration to treat that land for the collective good.

Originally Aired on April 19, 2007 (the week of the VT tragedy)

It’s another cool spring day, faint sun intermittently lighting up the pale greens and golds of emerging leaves. I am walking down a rough road from Bentivar Farm onto a vast floodplain. Sretched out before me are acres of lowland and wetlands that reach toward the point where the North and South Forks of the Rivanna meet. I know the banks from the river, having paddled both forks many a time, but today I’ve come to see restoration taking place in the flesh of the land itself.

My guide is Carolyn Browder, a restoration specialist for The Nature Conservancy, under whose care this bottomland has been for the last couple of years. She meets me by a small, unassuming stream at the bottom of the hill. It is here that, over a year and a half ago, the work commenced. The work of redefining the course of water flowing down from the surrounding hills so that it can do so without hauling loads of sediment and stormwater runoff with it.

Carolyn tells me parts of the story as we walk along stream, barely six feet across, and still running full from the rain of the last couple of days. Bubbling across a stretch of cobble, the water drops a foot over a large piece of cut rock, which has been placed strategically where an elevation decrease must be achieved without sacrificing the integrity of the channel. This channel has been purposefully rerouted to follow its historical course. Walking the moist ground, we can see where the rains had forced the water over the banks, the ryegrass bent like a comb-over and still mashed flat in downhill direction.

For decades, this rich bottomland was farmed, but it required work to drain the water from the floodplain enough to make planting corn even possible. This was accomplished by digging ditches to drain the water, and by using tile drains, terra cotta pipe sliced lengthwise and planted open side down, cupping the earth, while capillary action pulled the water along its course and towards the river. Meanwhile, the original stream coming down a crease in the hills above was routed so that it no longer bisected the fields and instead was tucked up against the hills lest it impede the work of farming this swatch of floodplain.

Land alternation had been heavy and significant long before this ditch and drain method was ever used. We know that earliest settlers set to work to clear the land, transforming forest into field, changing the relationship between the river and its floodplain forever. On the North Fork and the South Fork, indeed all along the Rivanna, you can see today the steep banks caused by the incessant erosional forces of mud-laden water washing off cleared land. In fact, the floodplain here sits some twenty feet higher than the river. This meant that the engineers designing a more natural stream channel had to build in a series of drops and slopes that would bring the watercourse into the river at a shallow and benign angle.

Carolyn’s job has been to oversee the work and continue to monitor its success as a restoration – making sure that the new stream reaches an equilibrium with its newly created banks and plateaus. That the disturbed land is kept clear of invasives such as Johnson grass. That high energy storms, such as those resulting from Katrina and Rita in the fall of 2005, don’t wash out the new stream as it’s settling in. That the right time to plant trees to form a protective buffer on either side is chosen wisely.

As we cross the stream, at another ledge of rock placed to create a drop and small pool that is now home to diversity of life, I start to gain an appreciation for the scale of the project. Looking back, I can see the sinuous curves, etched by clumps of grass and sedge that paint the landscape in subtle hues of green. A plover twitters across thirty feet in front of us towards the stream, disappearing into a camouflage of sandy soil and clumping grass. Every pool and every curve that is reinforced with boulders was conceived, then built, to give water a chance to be a stream in a channel that’s been designed s close as one can get to “natural.”

My boots are covered in muddy soil and there is a wide and open sky above. In a week that has been draped in horror and sadness so close to home, it feels particularly to good be walking a landscape that is surely in the process of change and healing.