Notes from my Knapsack 3-14-19

Notes from my Knapsack 3-14-19

Jeff Gill

 

Roads and ravines and streams

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It's with a wincing and morbid fascination that I watch the continued mangling of the course of Salt Run from Spring Valley, underneath and along Ohio 16 to its historic destiny in Raccoon Creek.

 

This once salty watercourse gave the Licking River and our county its name, truly a central stream in our local story, but now appearing to most passers-by as a simple ditch. Middleton's development across Weaver Drive herdes and silts it even more into a narrow channel, directed past the west edge of their benevolent development and north to the equally tamed Raccoon Creek bottomlands.

 

Tamed, but not tame entirely; floods can still surprise us. The interplay of rains and soil and springs which shaped our landscape in large ways still can creep up on us in small.

 

The central intersection of the 1805 establishment of Granville was selected both for a now lost mound once the center point of Broadway's meeting with Main, but also because of springs nearby, a few of which still trigger sump pumps in church basements nearby. Perhaps the erection of that mound had something to do with the springs being so handy.

 

All along the southern face of what are now the Welsh Hills, their geology directs water to the surface in a variety of spots once found to be life-giving for the thirsty, and traditionally thought of as access points to the underworld. A practical and spiritual source all at the same time. Now many of those once vital outpourings are almost immediately redirected into storm sewers; if you have a sense of their former locations, you can find a grating and lean down and listen, and still hear them roar.

 

One is just in front of my house. I can hear the echo of rushing water in dry seasons and wet; the deer can't quite hear it, but somehow they remember, and follow a lost watercourse from the hills to the north down into bottomlands to my south, even though the lawns are leveled off today. There are easier places for them to stroll their four-legged way, but they don't depart from the path of their predecessors.

 

Behind my house is Newark-Granville Road. A long, straight stretch from the foot of Ashley Hill east of us, past the Cherry Valley Road intersection itself fraught with history, but undeviating pretty much all the way to Clear Run and Mount Parnassus on the other side. It may mark deeper history than first sessions of common pleas courts and pioneer encampments, a path turned road that might, before the so-called "Indian trail" as the early settlers called it, have been a buffalo trace. Buffalo or bison could have worn that way which in turn, deeper back into unrecorded but no less real history, might have been a mastodon track. Thousands of years earlier, their trunks asway, tusks sweeping the grasses on either side, those mighty megafauna would have trodden deep a route from river crossing to watering hole, walking one after another in single file.

 

Sometimes I look out of an evening and imagine a line of mastodons or mammoths walking towards the village. The road's alignment tells a story, just as much as the realigned streams and rivulets do today.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he imagines all sorts of strange things. Tell him where you see streets and trails taking us at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.