The Watershed

One of the few passions of my father’s life was a trout farm fed by clean water which fell on, and was filtered through, a mountain somewhere in the inhospitable Appalachian chain. As such, this small mountain was referred to simply as “the watershed.” The name referred not to a magnificent peak, but to a protected area of land which was to be free largely from contamination as the trout depended on the water for their survival. A few stashes of papers and legal documents and newspaper clippings indicated that my father had spent some number of years in a legal dispute with the cement company who owned the land and the rights to the water in the area. Today a part of Cemex, "Medusa" was a major landowner in the area and leased much of its property to local farmers, individual homeowners, and to the sportsmen’s club with which my father was long involved. Most of the leases seemed to have been written for periods lasting some decades.

The other side of the watershed, opposite the trout farm, was home to a rifle range. The range was well above, up the mountain from a couple of old dynamite batteries, really just doorless cement sheds. Whenever we visited, each was bedecked with one or more of the skins of not particularly small snakes who'd found these cement shacks appropriate places to shed their skins and to slither out renewed. When I was very young, I confused these small cement sheds, referred to indifferently by my father as “batteries,” with the watershed itself. That they were called "batteries" was no less a mystery, and that they were used for the shedding of skins only added to the intrigue.

The rifle range, a few hundred meters still higher up the mountain, was primarily used by hunters, members of the club, for calibrating scopes or other sighting equipment on their rifles. As such, it needed to be well up the mountain, and the hunters needed to fire the rifles into the side of the mountain, as many such hunting rifles have a range of up to two miles. This was most commonly done in the mid-autumn, say October and November, and in time for the season for hunting deer which would begin at the end of November.

One year, for reasons I no longer recall, we were in the watershed, well outside of the season when it would be used for scoping rifles. It was a contained wilderness, one with a familiar name, and one with multiple haunts that might still bedazzle any young person.  My brothers and I wandered beyond the targeting area of the range, itself some 300 meters beyond the parking and firing area. This would normally have been a danger zone, as it was directly in the line of fire, and so far that had one not left a vehicle in the parking area, any odd rifleman could hardly be blamed for never noticing you, there among the brush beneath the slope of the mountain. Behind the battered row targeting frames, probably already at the maximum distance adults might easily walk, we found an immeasurable, vast, and crystal clear lake. It was situated in a shallow valley hugging the upper reaches of the mountain, and curved around the cliff sides. Without climbing to the very top of the mountain, the lake’s exact contour would never be well understood. I say crystal clear, because it was very plain, as far as we could see, that the entire bottom of the lake was coated in a layer of cottage green algae. Perhaps this was more of a type of slime or some very simple and unobtrusive life form. It was mystifying and enchanting.

One needn’t have lived a particularly naturalist upbringing to understand the majesty and mystery of discovering a wholly unanticipated and utterly resplendent body of water. We spent an afternoon studying the clouds of debris that rocks tossed into the shallows would emit when they collided with the green murk at the bottom of the lake. And it seemed perfectly obvious to us that this clear lake water was an inverse sky, carrying our dark clouds afar, always contained beneath the only momentarily disturbed surface of the lake.

I’ve often wondered at the level of contamination in that lake, as it was, after all below the cliff intended to absorb the volleys of lead and who knows what other heavy metals for decades gone by. Some distance down the mountain, we’d always find bright colored aluminum drinking cups, the kind popular in the 1960s, hung upside down near the several springs of drinking water near the dynamite batteries. But that’s how a watershed is supposed to work. The contamination stays up top.

"Watershed" has come to mean, both a geographical area which drains and is filtered to one side, as to my father’s trout farm and somewhat more so, to the division between two separate areas of drainage or two watershed areas. Thus figuratively, the word commonly refers to a critical point or moment, as in a negotiation, when two sides reach an agreement.

Inventing my own figuration, I always imagined that a “watershed moment” was when at last the water came crashing, filtering, churning down and now it was clean and arriving at some new hydrological configuration and certainly at a new level of understanding. That this mountain represented not only violence, contamination, and mythology, but that it was also continually refreshed with waves of rain that clung to tender shoots in that black primordial earth, burying an ancient sea bed, which even today, a cement company eagerly sought out.  

The lake, near the top, perhaps toxic, is still but one early experimental step on the way to understanding, to filtering out the contradictions, and arriving, closer to home, where the trout in their long cement channels, strain eagerly to swim faster and further. 

Because this was a rather experimental series, it seems to bear the longer explanation.

- March, 2018.