WatershedEvents

Up Fanno Creek - Photo Albums Coming Soon

 

Headwaters, Fanno Creek

 

These are the headwaters of Fanno Creek. They lie in a ditch just a few yards from the intersection of Hillsdale Highway and Old Bertha Road in southwest Portland. Getting to this spot cost me a pair of blue jeans and left me a shredded and bloody mess. Some of the thickest blackberry entanglements in the entire Fanno Creek watershed guard this dark and rarely seen ditch, and were it not for a stubborn streak a mile wide I might never have made it to the bottom. My photo program tells me I captured this shot on the 15^thof July, 2007. That’s just shy of two years ago, but it seems like a decade in terms of all that has happened since then. I was still on the fence about writing Up Fanno Creek at the time, even though I was almost a month into the journal that now serves as the basis for much of the book. A lot of water has run through Fanno Creek since then and my commitment to the project, like my commitment to the creek, has become rock solid.

 

 

Confluence of Fanno Creek and the Tualatin River (Fanno Creek enters from the left)

 

From its headwaters in the southeast Portland the creek runs for almost 15 miles through some of the most heavily urbanized areas in Oregon until it arrives at its confluence with the Tualatin River. In the process it flows through the jurisdictions of three counties and five cities. Its affairs are also governed by multiple state and federal agencies, making it one of the most heavily regulated water bodies in Oregon. The stream has a rich history and an equally rich prehistory. It is an artifact of some of the most spectacular geological occurrences to take place on the continent in the last fifty million years or so. For all of that the creek rarely leaps out at you, except during major rain events. 

            Since beginning work on Up Fanno Creek I’ve accumulated a large number of documentary photographs. Most of them are informative but few are handsome. While ambiguity may be the artist’s best friend, it is usually the documentarian’s downfall. Still, I’d like to share them with other people who may be as deeply interested in this little creek as I am. My plan is to create a number of small albums, each focused on a particular aspect of the creek. As these albums come on line some may be very small, perhaps only a shot or two to begin with, but I suspect the numbers in each will increase substantially as time goes by. There are usually substantial differences between the visual characteristics of one person’s computer screen and another’s so if these don’t look good on your monitor, I’m not sure what to do about that. Leave a comment if you find the color or the luminosity particularly awful and I’ll double check my set up here. I hope you will enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed collecting them.

Welcome to the Watershed

One can choose to live in a place as a sort of a visitor, or try to become an inhabitant.  (Gary Snyder, from Living in the Open)

Know your watershed.  (U. S. Environmental Protection Agency)

 

We move through of an ocean of air, a vast and shallow atmospheric sea we call the Sky. Under our feet and stretching away towards every horizon spreads the hard body of the Earth, the watershed for this ocean of air. We are something like a small bug wiggling away between two sheets of paper, one soft and translucent, the other gritty and opaque, either one capable of squishing us out of existence at any point in time. Too often we take our place in this space for granted and focus too much on where we’ve been or where we think we may be going than on where we actually are. Occasionally something spectacular or dreadful may happen that jerks us out of our distractions and reminds us of the precariousness of our position here between the sheets. Hurricanes lash coastlines, tornadoes scourge a landscape, floodwaters drown the countryside. Occasionally a mountain disintegrates and blasts its guts across the countryside, or a seamount slides and creates a tidal wave that buries hundreds of thousands of souls in muck and mud or sweeps them away into the sea. We watch and listen attentively, even if we are hundreds or thousands of miles away. We react appropriately, usually showing unbelievable fortitude if we are in the eye of the storm, or demonstrating real concern and abundant generosity if we are merely electronic witnesses. And then, like ants recovering from an attack on the nest, we return to the more prosaic aspects of everyday living.

The recovery may take some time, particularly if we happen to be actual survivors of the event, rather than merely witnesses; but for the vast majority of us the sense of urgency rapidly ebbs and the level of concern steadily fades. With the incredible resiliency and amazingly short memory of our species, we return to business as usual. We rebuild in the floodplain or resettle in the shadow of a “dormant” volcano; we buy a condo in the Bay Area or move into a trailer park outside Wichita; and we do these kinds of crazy things invariably and repeatedly and most of the time without a second thought.  We would be better served if we moved forward within this vast envelop with greater caution and a more profound sense of respect. Above all, we should remember where we are at all times. We should get to know – really know – our watershed addresses.