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Of the Creek

Panta Rhei (Everything flows)
Heraclitus

Dirt is mostly minerals; minute specks of rocky dust. It is empty of life. If you grab a handful from the ground, it falls away easily, slipping through your fingers. If it clumps in your hand, however, it isn’t dirt: it’s soil.  

Soil is life. It is a living ecosystem full of organic matter like microorganisms and fungi, as well as water and air. Its many components include old life capable of sustaining new life.

Wherever our species has been the soil likely holds traces of dead humans. Depending on environmental conditions, human DNA, like that of woolly mammoths and cave bears, may persist for hundreds of thousands of years.[1] Even here on warm, wet Potomac Creek, we literally are walking and growing radishes in the loam of slaves and masters, natives and immigrants. And of the Indigenous peoples who have persisted here for millennia.

Such people aren’t just attached to the soil of this place. They are the soil.

***

What makes us “of” a place? As in, Bill and Ida Lambert “of East Lansing?” Or, for that matter, “Jesus of Nazareth?”

I have always known this place is home.

Objectively, though, that needn’t have been the case. Intuitively, the answer to the question might be length of stay. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, thereby fulfilling a prophecy, but he grew up and lived in Nazareth. He was and still is “Jesus the Nazarene.” The places we inhabit physically always leave marks upon us, just as we in turn change them. The longer the duration of our stay, the more marks are left – places mark us, physically, socially, psychologically (and in this case, theologically). 

 

source: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35120965
I follow this pattern. I was born in Berlin, West Germany. I lived as a baby in Indiana, and as an adult my stays in foreign countries have extended into years. But whenever I journeyed to the place I had lived the longest, the farm alongside Potomac Creek, things just felt different. The drive on the interstate from the airport felt like a return. The forgotten lushness of the grass that grows even in the neglected highway medians. The many large and small bridges crossed by car, signaling a riverine land of innumerable creeks and streams flowing into rivers that hold personal significance. The humid Virginia air tastes familiar to me.

I am of this place.

Yet people aren’t so predictable. I know some who say they’re from a place they’ve never seen, or can’t remember. I want to understand what imprints a place so indelibly within one’s psyche and even cellular chemistry as to become inseparable from one's self. And more importantly, why for so many of us this deep, place-based sense of belonging seems so visceral.

I know life on Potomac Creek speaks to this riddle.  Nearly every animal moves for food or survival. The rare exceptions – set-in-place sponges, barnacles – may have an innate, immutable sense of having a “home.” But even the moving creatures often seem drawn to a given spot. Humans certainly do, if we take into evidence our universal habit of asking each other “Where’s home?” We expect everyone to be of some place, no matter how mobile we actually are.

And, while on the important issues animal lives appear no less complex than our own, their behavior suggests they seldom question where they belong. Perhaps this riddle plagues only overthinking humans.

***

Consider the American eel. Named in 1817 by French naturalist Charles Alexander Lesueur, eels are able to live in both fresh and salty waters.[2] Potomac Creek is host to this ancient, snake-like fish. It is supple, nocturnal, and a bottom dweller, and so rarely seen by casual observers, but it’s always here. Globally, eels are a popular food source whose life cycle has puzzled generations of fishermen and researchers. Part of the problem is that no known person has witnessed them breeding in the wild.[3] In fact, most scientific understanding has arrived only recently, with the advent of satellite tracking technology.

Long ago, I thought I had encountered an eel while net fishing in the creek for shad and herring. A boyhood friend and I spotted one lying next to a branch submerged in fast-moving, shallow water. We wanted a closer look. We found a nearby stick and clubbed it.

The dead animal we pulled out of the water horrified us: a long, slimy creature with a terrible round mouth filled with concentric rows of jagged teeth. The nightmarish image remains vivid almost five decades later.

source: https://www.britannica.com/animal/sea-lamprey

We didn’t know then that other fish live in Virginia that resemble eels superficially but aren’t actually related to them. Judging by my memory, what we’d found and killed was a sea lamprey – a primitive fish that uses teeth and an abrasive, piston-like tongue to suck blood and flesh from its prey of mostly larger fish and mammals. The lamprey’s life cycle reverses that of the American eel. Like the anadromous herring we were seeking, sea lampreys leave their ocean home to spawn (and die) in freshwaters like Potomac Creek. 

Eels, however, are catadromous. They spend most of their lives in the creek, migrating to spawn in the salty ocean. And their life stories are so poetically, almost magically transfigurative as to resemble fairy tales.  

source: https://alchetron.com/Leptocephalus

Each winter and early spring, eel eggs hatch as larvae called leptocephali – “slim heads” – for their appearance. Hatchlings are ribbon-like and eerily translucent. Their bodies lack ingredients like red blood cells that would make them more visible. These miniscule creatures drift for nearly a year on the currents of their birthplace, the Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea, a two-million-square-mile expanse of seaweed-filled but unusually deep and clear water. The Sargasso is the only sea that never touches land – a place long feared by sailors. It is here that four currents meet to form an enormous, clockwise oceanic gyre. Columbus’ ship the Santa Maria was becalmed here in 1492. Legends of lost ships trapped by thick Sargasso weeds endured for centuries afterward.

The floating larvae then metamorphose into tiny “glass eels.” Each transparent animal is about the length of a finger. Glass eels swim and drift from spring until early summer, eventually reaching East Coast estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay. Increasing pigmentation now turns them into “elvers” – from the Old English for a “passage” (fÓ•r) of eels. With time, they acquire the dark hue with yellow undertones that denotes the “yellow eel” stage. Now at least a year old, yellow eels enter freshwater ponds, rivers, and tributaries like Potomac Creek. They may even wiggle across small spits of wet land to reach its destination.

This freshwater place becomes the yellow eel’s long-term home. It will not leave until nature insists it must. The length of stay may be ten, twenty, or more years, depending on location and latitude. 

source: Wikipedia

After years in Potomac Creek or a similar place, the yellow eel makes yet another transformation. Like migratory birds, eels must physiologically prepare for a late summer or fall journey of thousands of miles. But they will do this only once. They stop eating, letting their intestines degenerate. The blood vessels supporting their swim bladders increase. Their eyes enlarge to improve vision in dark water.[4] Now a sexually mature “silver eel,” the animal migrates downstream towards the sea. Its destination – somehow unforgotten – is its original home, the Sargasso Sea.

How utterly different the warm, clear, and salty ocean must be from the polluted silt of Potomac Creek. I wonder if the aged eel knows a deep sense of return. What does it feel, surrounded once more by the distantly remembered, protective, almost amniotic waters of its birthplace?

There in the Sargasso, silver eels spawn up to four million buoyant eggs per female. Then, they die.

***

The combination of factors that prompt the eels’ return to the place of their nativity – temperature, water flow, lunar cycle – is a mystery to science.[5]  But the fact is that they do it. The eels know they must go home.

Humans today can roam almost anywhere, even off the planet. But studies show a penchant for keeping close to where we grew up. Or, if we do leave home – for better work, housing, marriage – a habit eventually to return. A clear majority of Americans stay in the state they were born.[6] 

Is there something about the air, the water, and the moon?


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