Watershed
October 3, 2008
Chris Bolgiano is a nature writer and Friends of the North Fork member who lives near the headwaters of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. She writes for this week's column, about a "sojourn" or raft trip that she took in 2003 — the first of many trips undertaken to bring attention to and raise concern for improving the health of the Shenandoah River. Chris answers the question:
Where in the Watershed Am I?
Few of us in the group known as the Shenandoah Sojourners, taking our first annual rafting trip down Virginia’s Shenandoah River in 2003, had any experience with a stream swollen ten times its normal size by heavy spring rains. .
For five days we paddled and camped along the banks with white water and white noise as part of our landscape. But the river was brown, a muddy, muscular arm so mighty it seemed beyond human powers of wrestling. When the rain stopped long enough to allow a campfire, we danced around it, both to dry our clothes and to celebrate the beauty of a river once so renowned for clarity that its Native American name is believed to mean “Clear-Eyed Daughter of the Stars.”
Now, like rivers across the country, the Shenandoah absorbs not only treated discharges from industries and municipal sewage treatment plants but also an untreated chemical soup that pours with every rain from rapidly developing towns and suburbs as well as farm fields and poultry houses. Every year since that first trip, the Shenandoah Sojourners have floated into thousands of belly-up fish. The cause of these die-offs is still unknown.
River sojourns, usually sponsored by a coalition of community groups and reported on by local media, have become a popular conservation strategy to engage the public on watershed issues The goal of river sojourns is to build a community around a shared watershed address by stimulating conversations among as many diverse stakeholders as possible. We have heard farmers relate how the fences recommended to keep cattle out of the river wash away in high water, causing them a constant expense. We have listened to foresters describe how logging roads should be constructed to mitigate erosion. We have toured wastewater plants, feasted on locally grown foods, and sang “Peace in the River” with a church choir.
I began to understand that discussions exploring a variety of perspectives on the river are as important as scientific analysis of water quality data. Only by building understanding can we hope to build the political will to make the enormous changes necessary to resolve such problems as the mysterious fish kills, which continue to be intensely studied.
But there was also a more personal subtext to the trip. As a Sojourner, I ran not only the river but a gamut of emotions as well, from terror at the first rapids to the happiness that only a flush toilet can bring. But mainly what I felt as I floated was wet, and maybe that’s what made me finally start seeing myself as part of the great global hydrological cycle that flows through every living cell. My “watershed address” stopped being an abstract concept and became a visceral reality. I began to see the North Fork, which runs near my house, as the living highway by which I find my place on the earth.
A person’s watershed address is arguably his or her most basic physical identity as a citizen of the planet. It’s a moving identity that encompasses everything downstream of wherever you are. I now know that my own resident watershed address is the tiny nameless rivulet closest to my house, which carries the results of whatever I do down to the North Fork, which takes it all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. What’s your address?
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