Reservoir

Today, four days from the end of October, I plan to walk the edge of a small creek. As the raven flies, it’s 15 miles east of our house, two ridges into the Ridge and Valley, yet I’ve never fished it.

A student of mine who went to high school in a nearby village told me about this place. On mornings in the fall, before the school day began, he’d wake in the dark and drive his truck up the switchback, park, and let his headlamp guide him down into the steep narrows.

In class, he sat at the back of the room and was as shy a student as I’ve had. Also, one of the most attentive. He repeatedly said books weren’t his thing. He surprised himself by falling deep into the stories Rick Bass wrote about hunting elk in Montana’s Yaak Valley. He also worried there wouldn’t be any wildness left when he had kids.

Near the end of the semester, he stayed after class and struggled to make eye contact. “Dr. Davis, you like to hike wild places, right? And fish for brookies, right?” he asked. 

I smiled. “You’ve got me pegged. Old trees, undisturbed ground, a fish rising to take a fly off the surface,” I told him. “I can’t think of anything better.”

“You know that abandoned reservoir I wrote about in my essay, where I archery hunt above the quarry?” he asked. “It’s pretty hard to get down into, but there are brookies in that run.”

He described how to get there, on a road that doesn’t get much use. The exchange felt like a confession. To share a place is a sacred trust. I thanked him and told him I wouldn’t tell a soul.

Now, as I traverse the sharp ridge, I lean and grab and slide. Rocks, dislodged by my boots, tumble before me with nothing to stop them until they hit the forest floor. A solid thunk that echoes up, followed by unnerving quiet. If I were to stumble, I wouldn’t fare as well as one of these stones. There’s an element of risk in the wildness I seek. To be in a place where the human world does not take precedence means learning to navigate what nature asks of us.

To find these slivers of ancient forest in Pennsylvania, I stay up late, scouring topo maps. My old eyes need abundant light, so I remove the shade from the lamp on my desk. The naked bulb shines over my shoulder, divulging stark lines that indicate elevation gain. It’s in the steepest gaps – tight waves drawn in black, undulating outward on the map – where I find remnant stands of old-growth pine and hemlock. When the forests were first timbered, it was simply too difficult to log these spaces, so they were passed over, forgotten. Sometimes that’s how we’re saved: inadvertently left behind to flourish in secret.

Where I search for the hidden reservoir, the trees are mostly hardwoods, but giant just the same. In the early afternoon sun, I’ve traveled from eye level with the crowns of massive red and chestnut oaks to the base of their trunks near the hollow’s shaded bottom. I look north along the pleated center of the mountain where tulip poplar, beech, and hemlock hang. Some of these trees are at least 200 years old. My descent has gobbled hundreds of feet, as well as centuries: the passage of time tucked neatly into this crack in the earth.

The reservoir, whose sides are comprised of the same talus I’ve just traversed, was built during the 1880s. I imagine mules were involved, and men treated like mules. Because this hollow is so cramped, the dammed water covers less than a quarter of an acre. Parts of the walls crumble. With the help of gravity and porous earth, water leaks away to find alternate routes down the mountain.

Just two nights before finding my way here, I dreamed about the land my grandfather and his grandfather before him cleared to make the Appalachian fields my family plowed. They constructed stone walls from fieldstone to serve as demarcations of property boundaries and barriers for livestock. In the dream, I dismantled walls, carrying stone after stone into the field to plant like seeds, hoping to prevent any plow from breaking ground, staving off corn and beans and sorghum. In the dream, milkweed burst forth, along with Joe Pye weed, jewelweed, and asters. All sorts of butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds flew from flower to flower. The earliest trees were only an imminent thought, a new forest decades away. I woke with a heavy chest.

Where the reservoir ends, the creek re-forms into a waterfall that drops 15 feet along a sheer barrier, preventing fish below the reservoir from mixing with fish above. This means the brookies high up are an isolated strain, cut off for more than a century from the valley and any invasive threat of wild brown trout that swim in the larger river that runs there.

The bottom of the reservoir is mucky with decades of leaf rot. Just above the dam, my boot sinks into viscous mud that swallows my leg to the knee. When I withdraw, a murkiness follows, leaving a dark cloud to drift on the slow current.

Skirting the reservoir’s collapsing sides, not far from where the creek enters, I spy three redds. A skirmish unfolds over one of them. A younger male challenges an older, brightly colored fish. Orange and red erupt along their bodies like wildfires. The brief altercation is a conflagration of commotion, but after a few short rounds, the challenger tails away toward the middle. Dominion is hard won and lasts such a short time, a season or two at the most. The challenger will likely rule this redd next year.

Thirty yards up from the reservoir, the stream transforms into a series of plunge pools. The creek is clean, clear, like glass in an aquarium. Trout face the descending current. As I approach from behind, I can see what they see, anticipating what might wash down from above: threat, or food, or the late autumn light.

Understanding how the stream is constructed – tumble of stone, wash of water, a tempo controlled by earth’s thinking – feels like a nudge toward accepting the relative importance of my life, of the troubles I think are insurmountable.

The longer I live, the more apparent it becomes that we’re never truly alone. Although many of our patterns of living – including our attraction to the screens on our devices – make us feel isolated, the seen and unseen strands that tie us to one another evidence a relationship that’s constant, irrefutable. A friend’s daughter declared when she was only 7 years old that with is the most important word in any language. The fact is we’re always with other living beings. When I hike some of the streams on our mountain that have been damaged by acid mine drainage and clearcutting, I try hard to hold on to this truth and not slump into despair.

It’s a thought I clung to when the Bellwood dam near my home was under construction for nearly two years. To build the new dam, engineers had to drain the reservoir, a sizeable body of water that supplies the neighboring towns. The absence was profound. A space that once held migrating tundra swans, Canada geese, wood ducks and mallards, heron, kingfisher, and bald eagles that liked to hunt the trout that grew large and plentiful within the fertile basin – all this was emptied, vacated. Left in its place was a muddy hole rimmed by scattered reeds and dying cattails. Red-winged blackbirds flew over in confusion and distrust. In the following months, I often wondered where the birds and fish might have escaped to, and if they’d come back when the work was finished.

When construction stopped, the loud, unsightly trucks vanished.

Gone were the flaggers who directed traffic, the crane that hovered over the face of the dam. The air grew still and quiet. I could hear the forest again. I’ve been coming to watch the emptiness fill up. Water from deep beneath the earth pushes into the 50-acre impression. The springs circle with white froth, gurgling with an unexpected force. The contractor says it may take six to eight weeks for the reservoir to load completely.

Meanwhile, above the smaller, forgotten reservoir, as I’ve made my way along the stream, the hollow has grown ever more narrow. I picture my student sitting quietly near dawn, waiting to see what the forest will reveal. That’s what I remember about his essay: not the deer he took, but the feeling, as he described it, that when he was in this place it felt like things might turn out alright.

The sun is low at my back and casts my shadow, causing trout to dart before me. It’s good to be with these fish, these trees, but if I’m going to make it home before dark, I’ll need to start climbing soon.