The Rivanna Rambler

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.

August 30, 2007

#56 A River Runs Through It:
Paddling the Rivanna from Darden Towe Park through Woolen Mills after the dam removal

Saturday morning. The first day free of humidity in a week. Also, the first day I get to travel by boat through the old Woolen Mills dam site just three days after the breach on August 15. Today, there will be no slow slog through impounded water behind the dam; no heart-stopping worries that I am getting too close to the 9 foot drop; and no portage through poison ivy over rough concrete to get around the dam to safe water below.

Even so, it’s an unlikely day to paddle. While there have been near-perfect conditions for dismantling the dam and assessing the structural results, the water level is not really optimum for a canoe trip. It is somewhere around 50 or 60 cfs, a seasonal low reflective of our drought conditions. Hopeful, I glance quickly at the water as we drive over Free Bridge. It’s shallow, for sure, and I see the usual rock outcroppings upstream that are evident in low water.

In the last several years, I have not paddled this stretch of the river very much, in large part due to the long and lifeless pool behind the dam and my perception that the river is too urbanized for enjoyment. So I am surprised, when we first shove off from the boat ramp at Darden Towe Park, how quickly we are in another world altogether. The level of the river in almost any flow is well below the tops of the banks – and while this is an unfortunate and problematic result of poor land practices in previous centuries, I immediately feel that I am now down, in another world - the one of kingfisher, green heron, Canada goose. Joe-pie weed’s pale purple blossoms hang heavy over the bank amidst the late summer blooms of wing stem, boneset, asters and goldenrod. As it turns out, the river is shallow, but quite passable, and we wend our way through outcrops of dark basalt and Cotoctan greenstone.

Suddenly, a head pops up ten feet away. I see brown, small eyes, whiskers, before it slides back down into the ripple of pondweed. We still our canoe and wait. When the animal comes up for another look, we recognize a small river otter who continues to forage amongst the weed for slow-moving fish and mussels on the bottom. We glide into the cool echoing expanse under the Free Bridge on down to the sandbar bend below Pantops.

We watch for the signs of where the drowned river started and is now finally exposed. It’s tricky, for last night’s rain left a bathtub wash of mud along the bowl of what was the impoundment. Slick banks of mud not yet claimed by vegetation and the absence of trees and shrubs are our clues as we can see where the river has dropped three, four, five feet and more as we descend along the length of what was a pool behind the dam. A green heron flaps up with a start, its crest raised in black alarm. And we too are surprised when we round the bend to see the startlingly sight of a river strewn with rocks and pools that have not been uncovered for 175 years. No longer punctuated by the horizontal drop that was the dam, the river disappears in the distance in a soft bend with Brown’s Mountain in the distance high above. Pockets of coarse sand have filled the crevasses in the black rock, ridged across the river here where the Southwest Mountains are cut by the Rivanna, and the work is still underway.

Now the going is not exactly smooth – we try to find and follow the channel as the water drops over small ledges and around sand bars. Occasionally, we run aground and have to sling a leg over the side of the canoe for a quick push. We’re not alone in our discovery this morning: a dozen blue-winged teal alight in a soft flush of wings from a downstream pool. Fly fisherman standing mid-river are casting into new territory, gently kissing the water with their lures. From time to time, we hear the sounds of runners and bike riders and the voices strollers along the Riverview Trail on our right and on the Old Mill Trail to our left.

Our arrival at the site of the old dam is somewhat anticlimactic. There’s still rubble to be removed and the water is so low that we cannot actually paddle through the twenty-foot wide channel. But it’s a good cool wade to shore, where we haul our boat up onto a grassy spot on Market Street and depart on foot back up to our car at Darden Towe.

And this, it turns out, is the best part of our canoe trip. As pedestrians along Riverview Park, we have a view, intermittently through the trees, of clear, slow flowing river. And despite the fact that the current is low, we hear the river, dropping from rock to pool on its way downstream. I don’t know the song it would sing, this river now undammed. But I know that my heart feels lighter, not just for the sweet river time that I have just had this Saturday morning, but also for the new freedom for this stretch of the Rivanna River. It’s a very good feeling.