Life on Waller Creek

There’s an old codger down on Waller Creek, rearranging rocks. What in the world is he trying to do? [Jones, Preface]

The old codger stood midstream in Waller Creek on a hot August morning, a muddy plastic bucket packed with an assortment of tools on a rock at his side. His dark blue cap and rubber boots were also marked by creek mud. He was too focused on his work to notice me settle in the shade beneath the bridge. He was building a small dam of stones to redirect the meager current of the creek into a pool of water on a limestone ledge. This diversion would create a small waterfall once the pool filled. As I watched him so absorbed in his creek-work, I recognized a kindred spirit, another creek meddler given to rearranging rocks and flows, and I silently admired the fun he was having. The old codger voiced his approval as the water pooled and spilled over the limestone, and he smiled, first at the splashing water and then at me. It would be over ten years later that I read his book and realized I had met Professor Joseph Jones on that hot August day at Waller Creek. By then, Joe was dead, and I was left to get to know him through his daughters and his other extraordinary work, Life on Waller Creek: A Palaver about History as Pure and Applied Education.

“Forty years and more I have packed my lunch to Waller Creek. Only since retirement, though, have I felt I had time to spend undertaking small improvements along its rugged banks: ephemeral gestures to be sure, but good for body and spirit alike – an hour or so, three or four days a week, before lunch. Instead of going up the wall I go down to the Creek.”[Jones p.1]

In this unassuming way, Joe begins his account of the life history of Waller Creek and his own long engagement with the creek. Professor Jones began teaching at the University of Texas in 1935, and each day he would walk down to the creek from his office in the English Department to eat his lunch and to put the stress of university life in perspective. Like Thoreau, whose writing Joe studied and loved, he kept a journal of his creek musings and observations. Waller Creek was Joe’s Walden Pond, a place known intimately over a lifetime, and, like Thoreau, he argued for the value of preserving wildness, finding it even in a long settled place.

But, unlike Saint Henry and subsequent nature writers, Joe writes with a rare openness to the ruinous attractions of the urban detritus found in the creek. He clearly loves the creek as a site for nature encounter and for reflection, but he deliberately undermines the seriousness of the conventions of nature literature by including humans and our environmental impacts as more than just something to be lamented. The degrading artifacts of humankind that so deeply disturb nature lovers are accepted by Joe as part of this hybrid ecosystem, a jumble of natural and artificial reflecting the history of the city commingling with the longer timescale of Waller Creek’s natural history. For Joe, Waller Creek embodied the flow of life, good and bad, human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, without a longing for the creek to be something better in order to love it.

Joe gives a faithful account of the degradation and delights of the creek by simply cataloging what he encounters there and sharing his thoughts about his encounters. He calls these lists of prosaic observations and thoughts, “Inventories,” and they are interspersed throughout the text like snapshots of the place. Joe justifies these inventories as a necessary part of the book by insisting that, “the casual, the accidental, the wayward all have a little more scope than straight narrative will stoop to tolerate.” Like the creek gathers urban runoff and detritus, these inventories gather together a seeming hodgepodge of particulars recorded by a literate observer at a moment in time. As the inventories accumulate through the course of the book, they paint a realistic portrait of his beloved “Cretaceous limestone gutter” with himself, all humans, and all human trash and treasure collected by the creek as part of the continuum of nature and not outside of it.

INVENTORY: I would hope…that the reader, if he should tire of being reminded overmuch of what an efficient trash-receiver (up to a point) the Creek has become in our day, will…first accept himself as part of the continuum and become his own short-term archeologist: such fugitive creek-things as I will be cataloguing here, when carried and buried, might be thought of as archeology going somewhere to happen. Thus, for example: Plastic beer cups (Brand X with blue map of Texas) in addition to the ever-ongoing deposit of beer cans…A grackle’s reflection as he flies low over a still pool…After a flood, young willows keep reminding us, for many days, “It went that-a-way,”…High-visibility translucent bluish plastic bags – like Portuguese-men-of-war on a Gulf beach, but not biodegradable…scars of the sewer builders, still evident after twenty, twenty-five years…A much-twisted-and-battered yellow umbrella. [Jones p. 5]

His inventories are like prose poems that reveal the ever changing assemblages of natural and manmade artifacts gathered by the creek. Most importantly, Jones demonstrates with these poetic inventories that this damaged urban creek is worthy of cherishing as it is, trash and all.

Finally, it is the playfulness and humor of his engagement with Waller Creek, his skillful palaver - the idle chatter he shared with me when we met along the creek - that I like the most about Joe and his book. Joe could laugh at himself and other creatures like grackles stealing bread crusts from his lunch bag. He was the old codger down on Waller Creek rearranging rocks and making trails, an unapologetic meddler in the creek who knew that the next flood would undo his work. His daughters tell the story of Joe taking them to lunch at Waller Creek and then folding their brown paper lunch bags into boats and light them on fire to send them on their final voyage downstream…then explaining to concerned campus police that it was merely an experiment in whimsy. That explanation and Joe’s book are the best kind of palaver.