Onion Creek

The red sand on the margins of Onion Creek today was not frozen, and its moist, thawed surface took a faint impression of my boots.  There were patches of snow, which looked icy but collapsed softly under foot.  Walking creeks and rivers is a pleasure of winter.  I walked the narrow creeks enclosed by second growth woods in coal hollows of southeastern Iowa when I was much younger.  That creek ice was often thin.  Part of its joy was to test its strength.  Under a boot toe would it send out radiating cracks but hold its form or drop through a sharp-cornered pane to the shallow water?  The best winter river walking was on the north shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota, where the rivers fall fast over the ancient shorelines of the former lake to current lake.  The icefalls on many of the rivers limited the good walking; others had smaller falls that could be circumnavigated.  I liked the different look of the world from the river, especially when one was accustomed to a view of the forest and river from the woods.  One saw from the river a different drape of cedar branches and gathered a broader sense of winter light behind the shadowed white fronts of the birch patches.

There were none of those effects of ice or trees to be seen along Onion Creek.  The nude single-leaf ash, these multistemmed clumps standing chest high, were the closest things to trees until I reached tamarisk thickets.  There was no ice to admire.  The creek was running fast and the channel full.  It had been over the main channel recently.  Dried vegetation on the gravel banks was matted and partially covered by sand.

Onion Creek runs to the Colorado River through Richardson Amphitheater from Fisher Valley, a high, sagebrush plain caught among the escarpments of mesas.  There is snow now among the headwaters of the creek.  The days have been warm, however, and the fast water reflects the melt, just as the sand matted vegetation on the gravel banks reflects the warmer days a week or so ago.

Where the banks narrowed I stepped up to walk above the cut.  The soil had been well churned by cows, and I altered my steps to avoid cow pies.  I stopped at a population of desert trumpets (a buckwheat, Eriogonum inflatum)—both the trumpets of the common name and the inflatum of its specific epithet refer to an ovoid swelling at the top of each branch, just below the point where it forms the next set of branches (technically, I would call this region the distal end of each internode).  The dead stems of desert trumpets were well dried in this season, and many branches were fractured or had fallen.  Each desert trumpet in the spring produces an array of branches that radiates from a cluster of green leaves.  The leaves rest at the surface of the soil, and, in this land of blowing sand, the leaves can be partially covered by tiny dunes that build during the growing season.  Each branch arising directly from the cluster of leaves forms a ring of additional branches just above its ovoid swelling, and these secondary branches often repeat the pattern of the first, swelling distally and then forming a ring of tertiary branches.  The tips of ultimate branches produce clusters of small, delicately yellow flowers.  The flowers and whatever fruits that had formed last summer and fall were long gone.  What remained were skeletons, gray arrays of radiating branches.  There was, however, at the base of each plant a cluster of small green leaves, next season’s foliage.  I kneeled to tease apart a cluster of leaves.  Each leaf was little more than a centimeter wide and had its edges tightly rolled under.  Sand was lodged under the rolled margin, and I rubbed the grains from the leaf bottoms with my thumb and onto my index finger. I pried leaves away from the apex they surrounded with my thumbnail.  The leaf bases and tinier inner leaves were deep yellow, the color of ripe peach meat.  I expected to find next spring’s concatenated stems sitting in miniature at the center of the leaf rosette or beside a leaf base but didn’t—this was probably only a consequence of my small sample and quick look.  In a few days I’ll examine another desert trumpet leaf rosette under a microscope for a more careful view.  I anticipate a view of spring’s green stems and possibly flowers.

I came to a fence short of the creek’s mouth and turned-back to avoid trespassing.  On my way back, I crossed sandy flats.  Weathered, white boulders, ribbed and hollowed by wind, rested in the sand.  They reminded me of the bones of joints and knobby ends of long bones.  It was as if the giant bones of the Bunyan family had been exposed here.

Comments

[Clare]

Larry,

I also enjoy walking on frozen rivers, and you're right, much of the charm is from viewing a familiar part of the world from a different point of view.