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Chapter 12 up pistoL Creek Because they rarely show their power unless engorged by heavy rains, urban creeks often hide from citizens’ sightlines. Sometimes they are all but obliterated by channelization and concrete, the trees and brush along their banks stripped away, their lifeblood rendered stagnant and stinking with the runoff and discharges of human activity. Which is a shame. Because sometimes a creek pumps a town’s lifeblood. Pistol Creek flows through the small city where I live, Maryville, and the town next to it, Alcoa. The paved Greenway follows it through three parks, where people transverse it multiple times on wooden bridges: walking, running, and biking. Kids and dogs wade in it. Geese, frogs, toads, fish and ducks live in it. I haven’t seen any boats on it, but sometimes , after heavy rains, sections of it look like class IV rapids, with foaming deadfall dams and narrow bends where water crashes against the banks and under bridges. I’ve seen it overflow many times, and I’ve seen it nearly dry. In a culture where a creek’s main purpose seems to be in the naming of subdivisions or strip malls or liquor stores, Pistol Creek seems a mainstay, a high profile survivor, unlikely to lend its name to commerce. I’d seen quite a bit of the Pistol from above, jogging on the Greenway, so I decided to explore the town from below, in my kayak, to see what the ducks and fish and dogs and kids had discovered. I’ve seen urban creeks much worse off than Pistol Creek, which seemed to me, at least in terms of what I could see from above, fairly clean, despite its course through two small cities. Other creeks, in nearby Knoxville, for example, aren’t so fortunate. Sometimes, just to see my nature-writing students’ reactions, I transport them to Knoxville’s Third Creek, which flows into the Tennessee River not far downstream of the University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium and the wastewater treatment plant. I don’t tell them where 150 Up Pistol Creek we’re going or what we’ll see, just that it’s urban hiking. This comes after a few hikes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, more of what they’re used to when they think of nature. As soon as we get out of the van, the students see the white signs with the black lettering warning against contact with Third Creek’s bacteria-infested waters. They usually make noises of disgust and might protest a bit at having to hike there. A fascinating variety of detritus decorates the banks and floats along the current as Third Creek runs through Tyson Park under an interstate and disgorges its contents into the Tennessee. I tell them to keep their eyes and ears open, to sniff the air. There used to be a factory on the far bank, a bellows with a tall brick smokestack and pipes that drained something or other into the river. There were smells that resembled the flatulence of industry. Now there’s only a football-field-sized concrete slab. The irony of it is that on Third Creek we would often see more wildlife than in the Smoky Mountains or some of the state parks I take them to. Great blue herons, ducks, hawks, groundhogs, and a variety of songbirds are active along the corridor, seemingly at home among the highway construction barrels, the cans and bottles and various containers that descend from the neighborhoods and the busy highways. Once I kayaked down the Tennessee River to Third Creek before a football game between Tennessee and Florida. Third Creek was my refuge from the Vol Navy, an endless procession of cabin cruisers commuting to the game. At half throttle they raised wakes big enough to break white and crash against the riprap-enforced banks with gale force. Up the creek, away from the hubbub , it was eerily peaceful, and I was able to paddle about a mile before I saw a large green head and torso floating in the water under a canopy of low hanging branches. I paddled forward, curious but dreading what I would have the misfortune to discover, smell, and report to the authorities. A drunken Tennessee fan who had stumbled and fallen into the creek? A Floridian who was pushed there? A homeless person who drowned himself? None of the above. Turns out someone lost their life-sized Shrek; the little horns gave...

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