Cleaning the Creek

Early this morning we headed north to the Georgia Mountains, to Holly Creek, near Chatsworth. The Nature Conservancy was sponsoring a clean-up location for Rivers Alive, "Georgia's annual volunteer waterway cleanup event that targets all waterways in the State including streams, rivers, lakes, beaches, and wetlands," according to the organization's website. Our mission was to clean up a certain length of Holly Creek. We left home before dawn and arrived at Holly Creek a little after 9 a.m., along with several other people. I'm not sure how many people participated at our site because as soon as volunteers arrived, we signed the necessary paperwork, chose a partner, got a trash bag, and went to work. A Boy Sout troop of about eight boys arrived, with their adult sponsors, families with young children showed up, as well as couples and folks on their own. We trudged the creek from around 9 a.m. to noon, and by the end of that time, we had collected many bags of garbage, as illustrated in the photo.

The most disgusting items I found were disposable diapers, especially one group stashed in a hole in a bank of the creek near a picnic area. Because the area had recently received rain, these diapers were not only full of human waste; they had also absorbed a large amount of rain water, so they weighed down one's trash bag quite a lot. Our daughter had the most disgusting experience of the group, however. Leaning down to pick up trash, she plunged her gloved hands into the putrefying remains of a small animal. She quickly returned to the rendezvous site to exchange her gloves for a fresh pair. Tom had the most exciting find: a dollar bill.

Despite the disappointment of discovering that such a pristine-looking area was so littered with human garbage, the clean-up was really quite enjoyable. The day was cloudy and very cool, and the woods created a sensory overload in colors and textures. I took photographs, but photographs cannot duplicate the experience or even a true image of the experience. In one shallow area of the creek, fall leaves had massed just below the surface of the water, creating an impressionistic image like a Monet painting. In another part of the creek where water rushed over and around several big rocks, the movement created a low rhythmic sound like distant, hollow drums. Staghorn moss covered slick areas of ground, fantastic mushrooms grew on the wet humus, bright red sweetgum leaves fluttered down from branches to catch on branches still blanketed with green leaves. Holly Creek is a beautiful place. Too bad people pollute such beautiful, soul-restoring places.