Notes from my Knapsack 7-21-22

Notes from my Knapsack 7-21-22
Jeff Gill

The village may change, not the well
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On a blue sky summer's day, I went in search of a place on the map.

Towards each summer's end, I have a personal tradition, a birthday gift to myself, where I spend a day or two afoot exploring the world nearby.

Some years back, I set myself a goal of catching the view from all of the significant high points surrounding the Newark Earthworks, so locations in Newark and Heath but also some points you might miss in the subtleties of our local landscape, in townships from Granville to Union and Licking. I got permissions and tried to stay on public or permitted land though I may have sidled up close to some trespassing, but never on purpose.

A few I had to return to late in the fall to see more clearly without leaves on the trees, but I bagged them all, just to put the viewscape clearly in my mind.

After that, I started to wade the rivers. Now this is where, as I've said before, I am not clear about how Ohio's trespassing laws work in public watercourses. I've gotten contradictory opinions from various knowledgable persons, and in general, I don't write a great deal about my creek walking in part because it's not the safest thing to be doing, especially on your own. I let family know when I'm going, where I'm traversing, and what time I expect to return, and they haven't lost me yet.

If I'm wading up or downstream, and a pool behind some obstruction creates a deep spot, and I clamber up the bank to work around it: am I trespassing? Odds are good that I may be. Again, I try not to.

My goal is to get a view of Licking County from the very bottom. We all know that keeping in our car, at a mile a minute, behind glass and air conditioning, up on the berm and the paved paths, is a terrible way to experience countryside. You get to know the roadkill, and spot only the most obvious trees, and plants only when they flower, if those. Otherwise you don't just miss the trees for the forest passing, you get it as a green blur.

Walking, carefully, along the rocky or mucky bottoms of creeks, which are mostly exposed in later August, you have to slow down. You can't even trot. And when you stop, as you must, you see the ribbon of sky overhead, the banks are actually above you, and the moving parade of water between your feet are all so much more immediate.

In the last decade, I've creek walked most of Raccoon Creek, up from Newark through Granville and past Alexandria, patchy through and around to the south of Johnstown, but only recently started working up past Green Hill Cemetery and Clover Valley Golf Course.

Depending on how you read the maps, Raccoon Creek's headwaters are in Hartford Township, just north of Tagg Road's intersection with Westley Chapel Road. When I visited, the first few hundred yards were dry, running first west before beginning the wide curve around Johnstown that ultimately heads it towards Newark.

But just west of the gravel road, a seep and a culvert and a still pond of runoff marked the furthest "upstream" of this watershed that was damp enough to deserve the name.

I hope you'll join me in an armchair exploration of this watershed, which I think is of mutual interest to us all who live in it.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he walks to work things out, or at least to clear his head. Tell him how you think better at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.