The Gully Washer. May 31, 2018

Copyright © 2018                               John F. Oyler

May 31, 2018

The Gully Washer

Gully Washer was my father’s term for the abrupt, heavy rainstorm that immediately forces small streams to overflow and for temporary streams to suddenly appear in every crevice running downhill. We had one late in the evening recently; severe enough that I was eager to inspect its aftereffects on my morning walk in the woods the next day. It was also severe enough to make the morning news – the Bridgeville Fire Department had to a rescue a motorist stuck in two feet of water on Baldwin Street.

Sure enough there was evidence of a massive over-wash where the path from the lower end of our street up the hill to the grade school crosses the tiny creek in our woods. At this point the creek passes through a long twenty-four-inch diameter pipe buried under the path.

Once or twice a year a gully washer provides so much runoff so rapidly that debris piles up at the entry to the pipe, backing up water so quickly that it soon overflows. This had obviously happened this time, as all the recently applied wood chips had disappeared.

In honor of Earth Day the Township Maintenance folks had trucked in reclaimed asphalt chunks and compacted them with a Bobcat so the “Greenie” volunteers could spread loads of wood chips on top and produce an ecologically friendly environment for school children and nature lovers. Once this was complete, the Gully Wash scheduler rubbed his hands together and allowed it to survive three weeks before washing it all down the hill and into the creek.

I was not surprised to see that the storm had carved out a gully a foot deep that will survive and grow till Earth Day 2019. About two hundred yards west of this path is another, equally steep, path that leads from the school to a permanent bridge over the creek. Several years ago it was the subject of an Eagle Scout project to eliminate the perennial gully that runoff carves through it.

The solution was the installation of a series of transverse landscape timbers to interrupt the runoff. Where the gully crossed the path they installed a makeshift catch basin feeding a buried pipe, with a piece of hardware cloth across the opening to turn away debris. It quickly plugged and soon the whole area was covered over.

This Spring I saw a man digging out the catch basin and the discharge from the pipe and shook my head in disbelief. Last week’s storm has deposited several bushels of wood chips, sand, and debris over the catch basin once again; the gully has reappeared, and the runoff once again is undermining the timbers.

A neat byproduct of a heavy storm, especially one accompanied by thunder and lightning, is the reinforcement of our humility. No matter how badly we mangle our natural environment, once we are gone (“When Earth’s last picture is painted … etc.”), it won’t take Nature very long to erase all the evidence of our existence.

This year’s Eagle Scout project is the improvement of what I call “Maya’s Trail”. Thirty years ago we had a brindle female boxer named Maya, who was skitterish around traffic. We would be fine on a trail along the south edge of the woods, fifty yards or so from the boundary street, then encounter a problem when it exited the woods and dumped us on a sidewalk for several hundred yards. I remedied this with a pair of long-handled trimmers by carving out my own trail, well inside the woods.

After a few years other folks began to use it; it was a perfect connector to the path above the artificial cliff at the southwest end of the soccer field. And, because it was so skillfully laid out, paralleling a natural gully, it was not subject to erosion. And now the endorsement of the Scouts and the Conservancy folks has made “Maya’s Trail” official, even if they don’t know its proper name.

Last week was “School in the Park”, an annual invasion of third graders and their teachers. I am sure it is well-intentioned and I hope it does generate curiosity about nature in the children. I enjoy inspecting their various work stations, during lunch hour., and occasionally learn something. This year it was “lady’s thumb”, a plant so-named because it does appear to have a thumb print in the middle of each leaf.

More significantly, I also found a sign identifying a tree as a “bitternut hickory”. For many years Hugh Carr and I have disagreed on nearly every subject – religion, trade unions, politics, popular music, etc. – but have found enough in common to remain friends. At one time he identified a prominent tree in the woods as a butternut. I immediately corrected him; after all we had a butternut at our cottage at Conneaut Lake, and this was no butternut.

I then studied tree identification books and eventually became convinced it was a bitternut hickory, so named because the nuts were so bitter that even squirrels would not eat them. I promptly stationed Hugh directly under the tree and explained his error. Just as I finished emoting, something fell at our feet. Would you believe, a squirrel was sitting directly above us, chewing on a nut!

Hugh has reminded of this regularly ever since. Recently I found a nut from the tree, cracked it open, and sampled it. Bitter is an understatement. Now that I have “School in the Park” on my side, I am ready to reopen the discussion.

One of my favorite popular songs from my youth is “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year”. When Sarah Vaughn sang it, she blamed it on her lover leaving her; today we blame such things on climate change. When Spring finally came this year, she came in a hurry. The golden blanket of celandines appeared in mid-April; a month later the leaves had dried up and disappeared completely.

Our trillium bloomed by the first of May, several nice clumps of white and painted varieties. Unfortunately we could not find the single, wine colored “sessile trillium” that we have been admiring in recent years. For some reason the Township Maintenance guys felled a large beech tree and dropped it right where we expected to find our sessile. According to the references we can find, it is not native to this area; I fear it is gone forever.

By mid-May the Mayflowers had finally bloomed, as well as a pair of plants I cannot identify – a serious threat to my reputation as guru of the woods. One is a very common fern with smooth, slender footballed shaped leaves and a slender white bloom centered on the stalk. The other is a small tree with serrated, rounded leaves and a complex white blossom. Typically, the bloom has five stalks with a large, four lobed flower at the end and a string of tiny five petalled flowers along the stalk.

The little meadow which contains the tulip tree we planted in memory of my wife is a sea of buttercups; she would have liked that. The tree appears to be prospering; we planted forget-me-nots and marigolds around its base.

I think I have been able to identify the fungi that are sprouted everywhere on dead stumps and rotting logs. They look like a cross between large ears oriented upward and pancakes. They are yellow/tan in color, with circumferential rings of brown spots, like an unevenly baked pancake. I believe they are “Dryad’s Saddles”, named for the tree nymphs of Greek mythology.

The large stump that housed the final letterbox in our four-box mystery quest finally gave up the ghost and tumbled into the stream bed. I was able to salvage the letter box which contained the final clue, a rubber stamp for the letter-boxer to stamp his/her journal, and a journal for him/her to record his/her visit.

We have lost the letterbox under the “Troll Bridge” (probably to trolls), and Winston, the concrete dog statue that points to the first letterbox, is now pointing the wrong way. Sounds like time for us to refresh our set of clues.

Winston’s orientation is a problem. My grandchildren think he comes back to life and night and wanders around till dawn approaches and that sometimes he forgets which direction he was looking when he woke up.

It is becoming harder each year for me to resist the temptation to stop and rest on the bench near the picnic pavilion. My physical fitness sense tells me I should continue without an interruption, but my emotional conscience tempts me with thoughts of how pleasant it is to just sit there and enjoy the wonder of the day.

I am pleased to report that the current Freedom Tree appears to be prospering. The original Freedom Tree was planted in the mid 1970s along with a plaque commemorating Major Robert Pietsch’s death in Vietnam. It was healthy until the early 1990s when it began to decline, finally dying in 2009.

Two years later a Girl Scout project relocated the plaque to a different site and planted a new Freedom Tree. It only survived one winter before expiring. Last Spring the same folks planted a new Freedom Tree, this time a tulip tree. At this point it appears to be perfectly healthy and well on the route to survival. My politically Conservative friends believe the sequence of its life cycle is not coincidental.

The biggest tree that blew down this Spring is an apparently healthy black cherry that was uprooted by high winds. Unlike many other trees the cherries lack a central taproot to anchor them deep into the soil. The small branches at the top of the fallen giant are fully in leaf, with tiny berries in profusion. Apparently no one has told them the tree is lying on its side with only a few roots still operative a hundred feet away.

What a blessing it is to have these wonderful woods to explore! Where else would one encounter tree nymphs, trolls, and night-wandering dog statues?