A photographic and informational overview of the Walnut Creek watershed, part of the Raccoon River basin in Iowa. Key water-related issues are presented, along with ecological strengths.
19. GREEN DARNER “ Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawning trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics, sucking whirlpools, drowned voices, stopped hearts.” -- Barry Lopez
27. Unidentified DRAGONFLY It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream…. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! The sun shot out from its silver side…. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water…. I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was fleshflake, feather, bone. -- Annie Dillard
30. FOX TRACKS, Greenwood Park “ I think of two landscapes--one outside the self, the other within…. The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape…. The shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.” -- Barry Lopez
41. RING-BILLED GULLS, DMWW “ Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” -- Norman McLean
42. Ecosystems OUTSIDE CUTBANK PROFILE “ In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong, nothing can surpass it.” -- Lao-Tzu
64. Urban Raccoon/Walnut confluence with Union Pacific rail line in foreground, late spring 2008 RAIL RIGHT-OF-WAYS ARE COMMON LOCATIONS FOR WATER PONDING & MOSQUITO BREEDING, ALONG WITH DENSE GROWTHS OF INVASIVE PLANTS.