GETTING INTO DITCHES
Rex Burress
While checking Guppy Creek in Oroville one day, it occurred to me that the roadside waterway was generally considered a drainage ditch.
True, excess winter rains drain water to the river, and you won't find “Guppy Creek” on a map, since my son coined that moniker when catching some of the mosquito fish planted there by the Mosquito Control crew. Nevertheless, where there is water, there is some kind of riparian habitat, and usually a local name for it.
Intermittent streams not more than a good-sized ditch are often “just there,” which is rare as we are a labeling society. I've ended up unofficially naming a few myself. When we lived at Alamo, CA, there was a lovely seasonal streambed out of the Las Trampas Corduroy Hills—considered a drainage ditch by the locals, until I named it “Wildrun Creek.” There was another rugged stream-way in the Mayacamas Mts that I tagged “Red Treasure Creek” because of giant boulders of jasper lodged in the canyon. There was also a treasure of wildlife there, including bobcats and pileated woodpeckers.
But I'm thinking of those small ditches, such as I remember on the Missouri farms. One of those ragged ditches drained water from the fields behind Grandpa Moore's place from a hill overlooking the bottom land to join a network of numerous other ditch-streams merging in a race to the Gulf of Mexico.
One ditch in particular below our house was first a playground for my boyhood imagination. I sailed shingle ships on puddles and 'fished' for crawdaddies until I was older and ventured on along the ditch through Floyd's Timber and on to Fox-Den Bluff, where the ditch dropped off into the No Creek cutoff.
Erosion is the main cause of ditches. Untethered banks break away in slabs of soil, effectively revealing hidden stones and root systems. A new cave-in always had to be explored in case Indian artifacts were uncovered, and Lake Superior agates were a prize. Rocks and glacial debris was carried south by the ice pack to be dropped all over Northern Missouri.
One could do worse than getting into ditches of the exploration type, especially for a boy clawing and sliding in the ditch-bank's soft soil, and making pocket-size discoveries to nestle in his pocket with his pocket knife.
Getting out of a wet ditch is a different challenge, just as escaping rocky canyon walls later in life was a test. One of the Midwest farmer's agonies was/is getting stuck in a muddy ditch in winter. Thaw-time was the worse when frost lingered under the sticky mud as if waiting to pull you under. Many ditches were filled with brush to lessen the impact of erosion and save soil.
Thoreau said education was often like making a straight-cut ditch of a free meandering brook, the thrust being that to wander is to allow time to find things along the way, rather than rushing through too fast to let it soak in. Nearly every stream in Grundy County has straight-cut sections to hasten flood water away from crop-lands, ruining the beauty of meandering creeks and rivers. Even the Missouri River has felt the blade of the U.S. Corps of Engineers “straightening things out”-- straightening and damming until a river wasn't a river anymore. At least not in its natural sense.
Once on the homeplace, Mother was resting on her sick-bed when visitor talk got around to working on sabbath Sundays. Knowing that I worked on Sundays at my park job, she defended me by quoting the Luke biblical passage about the necessity of getting an animal out of the ditch on Sunday. She said, “If one of you has an ass that falls into a ditch on Sunday, will you not pull it out?” Someone said it was ox, not ass. She replied, “Oh, ox or ass, it doesn't matter!”
“It's easier to make a camel jump a ditch than to make a fool listen to reason.” --Turkish Proverb
“I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing than in seeing a man trying to leap a ditch and tumbling into it.”--Samuel Johnson