I Shot an Arrow

I Shot an Arrow

Lucky for me my chosen spot for these observations on nature is close to our driveway. I am a coward today. I sit in my car, which isn't running, because outside it is colder than I can stand to hold a pen in a bare hand. Colder than my tablet or laptop can take. So in this car I sit and listen to the wind mock me. Wasn't bullying me into shelter enough? The west wind is spraying my Chevy with shotgun pellets of snow and ice that it scrapes off the driveway. It's not like last week’s tinkling melody of falling water drops. Thirty degrees makes a difference in the sound water makes when wind plays with it.

Water does interesting things in our yard.  We live on the crest of hill that is the nexus of three watersheds. This yard is the exact point of that concurrence. If I walk due west to the top of the driveway, move south about four feet and spit it will take a trip down my street, to Saltsburg and Mamont roads to Haymaker Run. (We didn’t have runs in New York. Those miniature rivers were named streams or creeks and sometimes, “kills” as in Peekskill and Fishkill if the Dutch name was still being used.) Back to my spit’s journey, Haymaker Run empties into Turtle Creek, a tributary of the Monongehela River. If I spit to my right it meanders down the hill makes a left turn on to Greensburg Road and dribbles into Pucketa Creek, which ends in the Allegheny River. Making a one-eighty to face the back yard and anything I spill finds its way into Beaver Run Reservoir by way of an unnamed stream in the woods behind my house and Poke Run. Almost every faucet in three counties pours out what I do in in my yard.

         I didn’t have a clue about any of this for the first ten years that Patty and I lived here. My neighbor, Harry, told me about our unique position in the area’s geography during one of his semi-regular history lessons. I was raking leaves when he said, “You know if you stand there and piss in a circle it will go three places.” That was Harry’s way of teaching me history and legend. He’d make a statement like that and wait for my, “Huh?”

Sitting here in the car I suddenly realize something bigger. The Allegheny and Monongehela merge in Pittsburgh to create the Ohio River, a major tributary of the Mississippi. How many water supplies between my house and the Mississippi Delta depend on me?  It is beyond my imagination. I can’t even count the number of states the rivers run through without a map. I wonder if the stuff in my yard has made it the Gulf of Mexico.

I don't use many chemicals in the yard.  Weeds are just as green as grass and don’t need to be cut as often so weed killer was never part of my yard routine. In the spring I sprayed the side of the house to keep ants from crawling in the windows. Paintbrushes got washed in the grass by the driveway. It got on my hands and I was fine. Turpentine didn’t even kill the grass on the rare occasion I needed to use it. I wasn’t worried. What would my little spills matter, anyway? Where does that arrow come down?