SEARCH FOR STILL WATER
Rex Burress
The rowdy winter of 2016-17 has stirred up some high, fast river water!
Before the break in the dam spillway, levels were already reaching 'road closure' status along the river through Oroville, and effectively scattering the winter waterfowl bunch and leaving few still pools for leisurely lingering. There is no relaxing on turbulent waters that race downstream as if eager to wipe out everything in order to reach the ocean.
Some of the mergansers and even mallards seemed to enjoy the bobbling ride in the fast current, floating downriver in their feathered lifeboats, and then flying back up to do it all over again! But when it came to finding food and lulling in still water, they had to search for a swirl near shore or behind a shrubby breakwater.
A couple of mergansers were thus snorkeling for minnows in such a pool below the Feather River Nature Center in newly water-covered “Maidu Cove.” I noticed a few egrets perched on a drift until they gave it up and went flapping away to some still-water marsh. Beaver and muskrats were flushed out of their bank dens as the flood water definitely disrupted the riparian community. Most wildlife residents fare better in flood, though, than in drought!
Then came the hole in the spillway and the overflow was halted to check the damage. Fowl and fish river denizens must have wondered what was going on when all that turbulence was suddenly dropped to a slower muddy-brown level, then opened back up to 20,000 cfs! 60,000 cfs! What next? Still water in a river is elusive!
Still water in a creek, like the old cut-off of No Creek during my Missouri boyhood days, can be a special place. The deep, diverted creek-way wound through our farm bottom land, severed from the main live flow by a drainage channel, but for a nature boy and fisherman, the land-locked creek section was wonder water!
Nearly every creek, and even Grand River, in Grundy County, MO, had been straightened by the U.S. Corps for flood control in the 1930's, a futile attempt at harnessing extremes of nature. When those creeks flood, they cover the whole bottom lands before receding to a gentle flow with holes of still water, especially old cut-offs with no current.
Of course, you can find plenty of still water in a lake unless wind whips the surface, but the best still-water places are found in tree-sheltered creeks with high banks cradling their precious calm-weather pools like a mother protecting her baby.
There are many locations called 'still-water,' including Stillwater, Oklahoma, now a populous city, but originally Indian country named for Stillwater Creek. The site was targeted during the 1889 “Land Run,” when multitudes of covered wagons lined up for the race to stake a free homestead!
One of my early rock hunts was near Stillwater, Nevada, which was a pony express mail stop in 1862, and now a ghost town, named from an adjacent, vast still-water slough, made into the Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge in 1949.
“Still waters run deep,” is a proverb of Latin origin now commonly taken to mean that a placid exterior can hide a passionate and subtle nature.
“Still waters may run deep/But sometimes/Down by the creek/Appears a/Crack/And that same water/Eventually/Seeps.” --Zina Lisha
“What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and of wilderness? Let them be left,/O let them be left, wildness and wet./Long live the water and the wilderness yet.” --Gerald Hopkins (1844-1889)