Cottonwood Pond: Everything Old is New Again (and Vice Versa)

Everything Old is New Again (and Vice Versa)

October 17, 2018

Some places very clearly show the evolution of Nature as forces work upon them. Cottonwood Pond is one of those places. Sometimes it floods gently. Sometimes water comes rushing into the area like a mad sculptor, changing the ground but also affecting things above ground. Sometimes is dries up, revealing new shapes.

Things disintegrate, things die. And new life arises. The cycle goes on and on, with constantly new forms.

For some time, I've been able to see a “face” in mud-filled bottom of fallen Cottonwood's Root Ball. It has existed, of course, in my own imagination, but was clear to me, and constantly changed between ghoulish, comical, whimsical, wise.

On this visit, even I would be hard-pressed to imagine a face in the Root Ball – so much more mud had fallen. However, the Cove area at the bottom resembled, to me, an open throat, as if the Root Ball was loudly singing, or calling out. Audibly silent, it could have been calling out a song about Time and the inevitable march of evolution.

This day was cold, windy, and sunny. Young trees were swaying in their upper reaches. Woodpeckers chattered. I could hear a squirrel in a tree, opening a nut. There were a few bird chirps here and there. A White-Breasted Nuthatch scooted down the bark of a tree near Cottonwood Pond, repeating its laugh-like call.

Previously, there had been a bout of hot weather, then cold, and intermittent rains. The Creek was puddled in some places, and barely moving in others

Creek bed, with Raccoon prints, leaf prints, old leaves, walnut

There was evidence of a heavy rain – striations in the Root Ball Bottom were signs of the downward movement of rain, and erosion of mud.

There was little standing water in the bowl of Cottonwood Pond, which otherwise consisted of deep mud. Flowing water, dense with sediment, had deposited fine, pale silt on the dead leaves of the pond bottom.

New avenues in the Creek valley had been further sculpted. I noticed that one of the new water flow avenues was coming dangerously close to where I had planted a Buttonbush a couple of years ago. I would need to keep watch and decide later if the plant, which likes wet areas, would likely tolerate its new conditions, or if the conditions would become so strong that the young shrub would be destabilized and would have to be moved.

Looking upstream, on both sides of the Barkless Log

The main Creek, with new avenues forming to both sides

The orange flag marks a Buttonbush - a new cut comes gradually closer

The downstream side of the Barkless Log, where a new cut is eroding ground around a triangle of land

During my September visit, one of the larger changes I found was the loss of the section of the Very Rotten Log that spanned the Creek – the same log I had used to traverse the Creek until it became too spongy. Each jagged, broken end jutted out a little ways over the Creek water. On this October visit, I could see the broken ends melting into the mud, gradually becoming a part of the earth.

The rest of the Very Rotten Log, extending to the edge of Cottonwood Pond, then under the Barkless Log at the far end, had long been disintegrating into the earth, and had been supporting new life in the process.

Earlier this year, a section had broken from this upper area, also, and water had been pushing it to the other side of the pond. On the October visit, I found the section among other debris – chunks of root from the Root Ball Bottom that had fallen into the bowl of water. All of this debris - roots and Very Rotten Log section - were disintegrating even more, and becoming mired in the silty mud.

Things fall apart. But, they give rise to new life.

Something new this time – a large piece of the root base of the Barkless Log had finally succumbed to rot and gravity.

Its evolution into soil would be expedited now, as more of its surface area was in contact with water and soil, and the microbes that move it along this process.

The whole Barkless Log (which I assume was once a Sugar Maple tree) was holding new life.

At the Cottonwood Pond section of the Barkless Log, I found another major change, another piece of something succumbed to gravity. Over time, the Bent Blue Beech, which arched over the Inlet end of the pond, had become the Broken Blue Beech. Then the two suspended sections created started to pull apart in distance as well as height. Now, the section closest to the Root Ball had completely broken and collapsed onto the Mud Pile at the southeast Root Ball edge. It was destined to become part of the soil there.

The nearby Elderberry plants had drooped over the Inlet, filling in the space left by the Broken Blue Beech. Meanwhile, the still-rooted old section of Blue Beech was helping new Blue Beech saplings to grow, and other types of tree saplings were growing rapidly larger from the decreasing Root Ball.

All of these same things were happening to the once grand Trunk of the fallen Cottonwood, but more slowly, as it is much larger. Over time, it had lost all of its bark, but for a small section close to the base, making the wood beneath more vulnerable. This Trunk had hosted a number of different fungi, slime molds, lichen, mosses, seedlings, and small animals during its life, and continued to do so.