Near my house, in a small city in Montana, is a creek called Pattee Creek. I pass by it often, on my way to the supermarket or the dentist’s office. It runs through a ditch between front yards and the street, through a cement channel, into a small marsh behind the dentist’s office, and through a culvert at the other side of the marsh. It comes out of a canyon called Pattee Canyon, a fold in the mountains that encircle the town. People around here seldom think about the creek except during the time of spring runoff, when suddenly it arrives chocolate brown and foaming and full, piling up at the culvert at Higgins Avenue like carpet skidded on the floor. At such times it is liable to flood whole neighborhoods of yards and basements. City workers watch it warily and measure its flow with metal tape measures; sandbags go on sale at the Army-Navy store.
Often, while that is happening, the mountains where Pattee Creek begins are still snow-covered and linen white. Leaning back in the dentist’s chair, I can see them gleaming in the far distance. Pattee Creek extends from there almost to here; from near-wilderness to my dentist’s back door.
In the spring of 1997 the snowpack in the mountains was twice as deep as usual. During warm spells people braced for the runoff, and the local paper ran headlines like HERE IT COMES! Sap dripped from maple tree branches broken by the wind; crocuses grouped like flights of darts along the sidewalks; and a general restlessness set in. The city waited, like an apartment building where men are lowering a grand piano down the stairs. As the number of watchers along the rising margins of Pattee Creek grew, I sometimes joined them. I can watch flowing water for any amount of time. Also, I like to mess around creeks. I find them companionable—flowing water of just the right scale. As the spring progressed and the snows unlocked, I rambled along the whole course of Pattee Creek, from the culvert by the parking lot at Wal-Mart to the mountaintop twenty miles away.
I want to know where all this water is coming from. I drive up Pattee Canyon Road, which winds and narrows up the canyon, jumping the creek again and again on its way. I continue beyond where the sidewalk stops, past the farthest lawn, up into the colder canyon air. Here the creek tumbles through a melting and pockmarked mini-canyon of snow and gravel, the ruins of the berm the snowplow left alongside the road. I pull into a state-forest parking area and get out and walk. A mile or so farther up the road, the berm has not yet melted and still completely covers the creek. The berm is as high as my head, still its old midwinter self, a tough amalgam of snow and ice and road sand and oil and beer cans and muffler parts and yellow paint chips from the no-passing stripe. It looks like
a collaboration between man and nature that nothing can destroy. I lean against it at full length and press my ear against its gritty chill. From far underneath, Pattee Creek is a dim, insistent murmur.
Today, in my search for the creek’s source, this is the best I can do. The snow that looked so white from the valley is actually old and winter-worn. Here and there an unsullied snowfield rises in a shaded part of the mountain like the tail fin of a giant airplane. But under the trees the snow is furry with pine needles and bits of moss, and it grabs the ankles soggily. About every third step, I fall through to my waist—so forget it. Ribs of a winter-killed deer sit atop a snow patch, neat as the beginning of a sailboat model. From the base of a snowbank in the sun, meltwater issues in a wide, flat sheet.
Along the course of the creek through town, sandbags are everywhere. In some of the low-lying neighborhoods, sandbag emplacements laid neatly on the property lines give houses a military air. The city has diverted part of the creek onto a public park, where it rises shin-deep in the baseball field; other than that, no serious flooding so far.
Up in the canyon, plenty of snow remains. In open, sunny places, clear meltwater flows with no visible bed across the pine-needle floor. Thin sheets of water run over the road, now one way, now the other, and riffle in the potholes. A capillary web of little streams connects and connects again, gurgling from a dozen little canyons down to the main creek. On the surface of a pool where a tributary joins, a pinwheel of foam turns like a hurricane seen from the air. Helmeted bicyclists
whir past, stripes of mud spattered up their bright-yellow backs.
My wife drops me off at the trailhead in the canyon, as near as I can get to the top of the creek’s watershed. The snow has shrunk back into the places of deepest shade, and walking is easier. I follow the creek up and up, taking the larger branch every time it divides. Soon the flow is a two-foot-wide streamlet coming down one rut or another of a logging road through a ponderosa forest. I’m high up now, and breathing hard; ridge light beckons ahead.
At a switchback in the logging road, the streamlet ends in a wet patch around an upwelling of water the size of a serving platter: a spring. On the bare mountainside above are two or three smaller wet patches, each draining into the one below it. From the topmost seep, a wetness of black mud marbled with tan sand, about ten inches across, flows a noiseless trickle the width of a braided belt. And from there on up, the ground is completely dry. This, multiplied, is the source of Pattee Creek.
I continue to the ridgetop just beyond, scaring up a grouse whose wings make a sound like sails luffing in a stiff breeze. On the ridgetop, to my surprise, is another logging road. From it the view to the east, away from the city, is vast—a wooded canyon crossed with powerlines, more mountains, and far silver-blue snow clouds piled high. A squirrel chatters, dropping pinecone shards through the branches. A chickadee sings. To the west, amid the woodsmoke- and smog-blurred cityscape spread out below, a speck of light flashes, maybe from the windshield of a turning car.
I walk all the way back down to the city. Going this direction is more pleasant—I can see why water prefers it. It’s two hours of walking to the first red-winged blackbird song, two and a half to the first redwood deck and barbecue grill. On the front stoop of a streamside house, a woman turns, holds up a paper sack, and asks someone behind the closed screen door, “Now, you’re sure you don’t want these sweetbreads?” It’s about a three-hour walk to there.
Still, the water comes. In town, Pattee Creek splashes along its concrete channel night and day. People who live by it must be getting tired of listening to it. A gray-haired woman in hip boots eyes it from her yard, while another woman stands by a culvert with a garden rake, ready to fish out obstructing pieces of trash. The only place the creek seems to pause in its entire course is in the marsh behind the dentist’s office. Here it tops off the marsh’s connecting ponds right to their grassy rims with water the color of coffee and cream. Ducklings zip across the surface, their paddle-wheeling feet a blur. A pair of muskrats work the margins; last year’s cattails disintegrate to down; birdsong rises. Streets and buildings enclose the marsh on all sides, and no doubt would cover it over if they could. Too expensive and troublesome to fill in, this ignored little wetland survives.
For the creek, it’s still a long way to the river. Emerging from the marsh’s outflow it reassumes its character, keeping to a single channel for a couple of blocks past an apartment building, a self-storage place, and a condominium development. Then it comes to a headgate and splits into several
smaller channels that dodge under fences and across back yards like a bunch of kids running from the police. The channel I follow goes down alleys, between houses, under a makeshift plank bridge on which someone has written “Tyler is in trouble,” right by a basement window with video-game controls and a tissue box on the sill, past traffic lights, under the apron of a Surejam convenience store, behind a store that sells hot tubs, and along the railroad tracks leading south out of town.
This is the city-limits zone, of discount stores spread amoebalike on the horizon and sky-high gas station signs. The stream crosses under the tracks, running now through a bed that is like a rain gutter between the railroad and a four-lane highway. The highway and the tracks begin to rise and the streambed to descend. As tires bump on the steel joint of a highway bridge, the stream beside it goes over a ledge, down a fifteen-foot grade of jumbled rock, and into the Bitterroot River.
We have reached the mouth of Pattee Creek—or of the bureaucratized, channelized subsection represented here. Its water arrives tumbling and foaming, sending bubbles in a slow upstream eddy along the shore. The eddy bends out toward the main current, and the Bitterroot, flowing full and fast, speeds it away. When the bubbles burst, they leave rings on the moving surface that lose their circularity like smoke rings in a breath of air. On ahead is the Clark Fork River, Pend Oreille Lake, the Columbia River, and the Pacific Ocean.
Much of the natural world now resembles Pattee Creek. It coexists with pavement; it goes about its business usually unnoticed;
and it has a reputation as a nuisance. It’s the moles in the lawn, the black ice on the interstate, the sinkage under the patio. For some reason, I prefer it to nature of the more remote and pristine kind. At least on the shores of Pattee Creek, I don’t fear that my very presence is making it less pristine.
As the runoff went on and on—through May, through June—it showed its disregard for popular opinion. We wanted it over; the mountains were like a stadium parking lot taking forever to empty out. Luckily, there was never a big surge of flooding, no great hot spells or rains; most of the basements in my neighborhood stayed dry. The Pattee Creek drainage was mostly clear by mid-May, but elsewhere in the mountains the snows hung on. The rivers by the end of June were still too high and muddy to fish in. The Forest Service said that the high flows had undermined many streambanks and that people should stay off them. I ignored this warning; while kneeling to free a fishing lure stuck on a root just below the waterline, I felt the entire bank beneath me give. I went with it, clear over my head into the Bitterroot River. I could not believe that on the twenty-third of June any water could be so turbid or so cold.
Because of all the moisture, wildflowers spread over the slopes of Pattee Canyon a minute after the snows were gone. Buttercups bloomed along the creekbed all the way from the heights to where it meets the river, and at some point yellow flag irises escaped from a garden to join them. The yellow flags were still blooming along a ditch bank in July, when Pattee Creek had dwindled to a ribbon of water, clearer than air, that you had to part the streamside grasses to find.
(1998)