Because I no longer have a day job, I sometimes spend the cool, blue afternoons of autumn on a nearby creek, wandering. The stream turns and turns and turns. In fact, the Big Raccoon bends itself so often that anyone walking its banks or kayaking its water will, sooner or later, be headed in any direction the compass can point.
With nearly each of those pivots, the creek sprouts sandbars like weeds. They are places — along with the occasional ankle-deep shoal — that supply me with entertainment, for I’m an inveterate collector of stones and fossils, driftwood, and snail shells.
I asked a geologist a few years ago how sandbars formed, and his explanation seemed tailor-made for that creek. He told me that sandbars in “meandering streams” are formed when water in the middle of a straight channel travels at a high velocity, and when that water reaches a bend, it runs fastest toward the outside, leaving less velocity in the flow on the inner bank.
The inside of the curve collects more of the eroded sediments that the faster-moving waters glean from the outer banks, so a sandbar piles itself up. Along with the fine sand dredged from the banks and scoured from the creek’s bottom, gravel and whatever else has been tossed or dumped or fallen into the stream are deposited. I can always fill a bag with the ever-present aluminum cans, the occasional boot, the jagged glass of decades-old canning jars, but I also rake in a treasure trove of crinoids and horn corals, polished coal and water-tumbled quartzes, deer antlers, and once even a century-old medicine bottle.
Of course, sandbars also give me places to walk out onto the creek. They let me get alongside it, wade in it, smell it. They are places where the living things of the surrounding woods emerge into the open from behind green leafy curtains and show themselves. On one sandbar near the farm my in-laws lived on for over half a century, I regularly witness a menagerie: the whimsy of blue damselflies, the unexpected speed of diving soft-shelled turtles, the determination of leaf-toting muskrats, the elegance of wading deer, the singlemindedness of water-sipping goldfinches, and on more than one occasion, raccoons that swam the width of the creek in the fading light of warm evenings.
Although we manage to get our grandsons to the creek some, I mostly walk the sandbars alone now, stooping every so often to pick up a bit of polished glass or weathered wood, but also to stand and watch puddling butterflies or passing hawks. Sandbars are places worth knowing.
Mike Lunsford is a freelance columnist, feature writer, and photographer based in Parke County. Contact Lunsford at hickory913@gmail.com.
