Photography: Converging Flows

Hello! This is Ed. I’m out of my mind right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Actually I’m just having a low energy day today. I wanted to ride, needed some time out in isolation to pray, and it was beautiful, if windy. While I could have ridden much farther, I suppose, my heart wasn’t in it. So I took Midwest Boulevard north to the river and jumped off on the south bank. Today is the day I would explore down to the mouth of Crutcho Creek. If you want to see it on a map, the coordinates are [35.521407, -97.388000] on Google Maps. Crutcho Creek runs in from the SW and snakes wickedly all over the place, so that in the last quarter mile of geographic distance it adds more than a half-mile running distance. This is all east of Midwest Boulevard.

My ostensible goal was to see the mouth of Crutcho Creek (image left, flowing from the right). I knew that I was permitted to move along the river bank, but I didn’t get very far. At first I dropped down onto the sand bank and walked all the way to the end of the sandbars (first image above) and took a shot of the bend in the river, but the mouth of Crutcho was still out of view on the right. So back up I went and tried a few other trails, but they kept ending in thorny vines. Finally I just went out onto the margin of the mowed area and notice I was hardly the only one to do so. It led to a very wide trail through the woods (image right). I could tell I was the first to pass in several days, because the passing brief rain showers from Sunday had left a fine stippled pattern in the sand. There were no tracks of any sort breaking that pattern until I got there.

My curiosity satisfied, I came back out and poked around under the bridge just a bit. OKC Parks had laid a heavy woven burlap on the soil, but I don’t think they seeded it with grass. Already there are places where the red clay ground had washed out under that cover. What’s growing through is simply native foliage that sprouts randomly. The water level is moderately low today, so it there are some deep pools and not a lot of flow. It was a good thing the crews dredged it out there under the bridge; it encourages fish to hang around within easy reach of folks who stop on the bridge above. However, I’ve seen more turtles than anything else.

On the way back, I stopped and caught this image. See those clumps of bright golden grass waving in the wind? Those are friends of mine. We have over a dozen native species of grass around here, but this is the only one that calls my name. I caught it here at the end of it’s hibernation season. It turns gold like that in fall and stands in shocks of lovely amber all winter. We’ve hand an early spring warmth, so in the next few weeks the base will sprout green and the golden stalks will fall over, and eventually break off, mostly. By summer the gold will be gone, replaced by a brilliant green.