2. Dam it!

Some kinds of rock spark deep feelings: the gemmier sort, of course, but also many that are dull or at least less lustrous. I would wager, though, that not many share my deep attachment to sandstone. It's admittedly on the boring, sedimentary side of things (as perhaps am I), lacking the natural smoothness of its even more finely settled cousins, and certainly possessing no claim to formation in the fiery core of the earth or an ability to endure the winds and rains of a thousand years. But fond of it I nevertheless am. For sandstone was my first real building material.

I grew up in a valley formed by a small and inconsequential tributary to the Ohio River, into which it emptied itself about fifteen miles downstream from where the Ohio gets its start. That tributary, a "little" creek whose "big" but otherwise similarly named sibling was found in the next valley down, flowed along the edge of our property, separating it from the road and the other houses that dotted a half-mile floodplain that made up our semi-rural neighborhood. Our valley, like many in the region, was formed mostly out of sandstone and shale covered with clay, with a thin coating of biomass – by the time I arrived on the scene, a healthy second-growth forest that we just called "the woods" – resting precariously on top. (Shale is of course famous these days for its ability to hold tiny pockets of natural gas, due to which formations of it attract frackers like shit attracts flies. But I’ll write about shale some other time.) Almost all the valley's houses lay at the base of the hills, mostly because with enough rain and human disruption, this biomass has a tendency to give up its fight against gravity and treat the slick clay as its own private slip-and-slide. The fact that any house has successfully been built on a hillside in the region and managed to remain where it was sited is much more remarkable than it might sound.

But it wasn't houses that sandstone provided me building material for, for I built not up the slopes but at their very bottom: I built dams.

The creek that had slowly been carving out the valley over millions of years was indeed little, but it was big enough that you couldn't jump across it, except at one or two places in the low water of August and September. That meant that it was perfect for kid-sized engineering projects. And unlike limestone and granite, which formed the beds of the streams in other places I learned about (and greatly envied) from the fish-focused journalism I came to consume, the bed of my creek was mostly sandstone. While big blocks of the stuff were quarried in the first half of the 19^th century from close to the hilltop on the other side of the valley, some ending up as foundation walls of the house I grew up in, the stream bed sandstone tended to naturally shear off in layers an inch or two thick. Presumably this was from the combination of a robust freeze-thaw cycle in winter and the forces of moving water, but whatever the cause, the result was an annually renewed and reshuffled deck of flat rocks of varying sizes. These rocks were eminently stackable, provided one wasn’t picky about a few gaps, and a well-crafted stack with some bigger rocks placed vertically behind it did a fine job of slowing the creek's flow enough to create a satisfyingly deep pool.

A new dam might take a couple of days to build, but a beginning-of-summer rebuild could be done in one, with expansion or maintenance filling up parts of others. Construction was mostly about finding the best shaped rock to fit with the rest, layering across the width of the creek and forcing the water to rise, then adding to the corners as the new pool spread out and around the initial structure. Blocking the water was the main goal, but sometimes we aimed also to create a small waterfall that would carve out another pool below the dam. Raw hands and sore muscles at the end of the day were always the result and were as welcome as the discovery of crayfish, salamanders, stone flies, darters, and other creatures beneath the rocks we dislodged from the banks and bottom of the creek.

Dams these days have a bad reputation, and rightly so. We've dammed the hell out of our continent's rivers and streams, and this has meant that the nourishing sediment that used to migrate from mountains and hills to the deltas where rivers meet the sea is no longer finding its way there, and, in the reverse direction, species that migrate upriver can't do so. These dams are mostly old, and, like so much of our nation's old infrastructure (and many of our politicians), they've become weak and thereby dangerous. But a dam built by kids in a small creek isn't like these. High spring waters, often carrying large chunks of ice, annually knocked holes in our dams, ensuring that any sediment that sought southern refuge was able to do so (at least before getting caught in one of the many dams of the Ohio or, if it made it that far, the Mississippi), and that any living organisms who wanted to move about the stream bed could do so as well. Perhaps there was some net ecological downside to what we did, but I certainly didn't see it. Like the dams of the beavers that lived a couple of miles upstream, ours provided disruptions that allowed for a visible intensification of life that wasn't otherwise possible. For a slow, deep pool provides cover and reprieve from the force of the current for many species. This lesson has stuck with me. Building is inevitably disruptive, but it needn't thereby be destructive.

I haven’t fished for years, and most of my water time has been at lakes or, occasionally, oceans. But lately I've been craving the feeling of being in the moving water again, hoping a trout will want what I’m offering. Much of the shape of that craving comes from experiences of fishing in the bigger granite-bottomed streams I graduated to when I ended up in college near some of the prettiest water in the Appalachians. But really what I want more than anything is the feeling of Western Pennsylvania creek water moving around my feet as I crouch below a rough wall of sandstone I've stacked myself, spying over it to see where fish are rising in the pool above.

Some of this sandstone is still with me. A few years ago, when I helped my parents move out of the house I grew up in so they could join us here in the upper Midwest, I brought back a few pieces from the creek bed, knowing it was unlikely I would ever return to see it in person. I have them laid as stepping stones in the front garden. They're not stacked to slow a creek's progress. No water flows over them, except rain. Occasionally I'll move them, as this or that project dictates, and when I’ve forgotten to put gloves on before I do so, the rough surface wears against my skin and leaves me feeling them in my fingers for hours or a day after I have set them back on to the earth.