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April
1997
A WALK IN THE VALLEY
Beneath the trees, one can't imagine an expressway
Christine Wilson
The Hamilton Spectator
It
is a cool spring day in late May. I am sitting on a little
gravel beach beside Red Hill Creek, watching my two young
children as they play. Although we live in the west end
of Hamilton near Cootes Paradise, there is something about
the Red Hill Valley that keeps drawing us back to it. Probably
it is the creek itself; the chatter of the creek combines
with the surrounding tangle of forest to create a near wilderness
experience that is rare inside urban areas.
One-year
old Susie is fascinated by the rocks, picking them up one
by one and turning them over in her hands. Four-year old
Jamie is throwing rocks into the water, the bigger the better.
Of course, pretty soon he attracts Susie's attention and
she has to throw rocks in too. Even though it is not yet
summer, we are surrounded by deep forest; the river is almost
completely shaded by the leafy trees hanging over it. The
cover is so thick that I can't spot any birds, although
when I listen I can hear the calls of robins and song sparrows
above the gurgle of the creek. Although we are only about
30 m south of Melvin Street, we cannot hear any traffic,
so completely do the forest and the creek muffle outside
noises.
My
husband Joe is wading upstream in the creek with a dip net,
scooping up minnows from under rocks to see what he can
find. He gets a good net full, and Jamie runs up to him
to look at the fish and help put them back in the creek.
Pretty soon Joe is out of sight, so I collect the kids and
wander up the trail to the next beach. The trails in this
part of the valley are informal foot paths, too narrow and
rough even for our big-wheeled stroller, so I carry Susie
on my shoulders or hip as I walk along. In a couple of places
the trail is blocked by logs almost a meter in diameter,
which Jamie manages to scramble over with only the occasional
boost from me.
After
another break on a little beach trying to keep Susie from
eating too much sand, I begin to wonder where Joe has got
to, and also how close we are to the cliffs that the creek
has exposed in the middle of this section of the valley.
I've only seen those cliffs once before, and that was walking
north from Queenston Road, last fall soon after Susie was
born. They are quite striking, a deep brick red with pale
stripes of grey clay running through them, and I'd like
to see them again. We wander up the trail again and after
a 5 meter climb find ourselves at the top of the cliff looking
down: a nice spot to view the creek, but not a good one
for seeing the cliffs! We can see Joe down below us in the
river, near a big rocky island. We trace our steps carefully
back down to the river, and, since his feet are already
wet, Joe carries all of us (even me!) across the river to
the island. From there I have a nice view of the cliffs,
and Jamie and Susie have big rocks to throw in the water
and pieces of the red and grey clay to break up. These cliffs
are a bit downstream of the one I saw last fall, but they
provide the same striking relief to the gently rolling valley.
"The chatter of the creek combines with the surrounding tangle of forest to create a near wilderness experience that is rare inside urban areas." |
After
about an hour by the river, it's time to head home before
the wet family members (and that's most of us) get too cold.
It takes us about 15 minutes steady walking to get back
to Melvin Street. As I juggle Susie on my hip and help Jamie
find the path back, I wonder, as I usually do when I'm in
the Red Hill Valley, exactly where the proposed expressway
is supposed to run through here. I ask Joe, and he says
he thinks probably the expressway will run to the east of
the river at this point. But the valley is not very wide;
although we have the illusion of being deep in forest, if
the leaves weren't out we'd be able to see the houses that
back onto the valley at each side. So even though the expressway
would run on the opposite bank to where I am standing, it
is likely that many of the trees that surround us would
need to be chopped down, exposing the creek to direct sunlight,
raising the water temperature, and changing the environment
for the fish and other animals that live in it. That is,
if the creek doesn't have to be confined to a concrete channel
to make room for the expressway at all. I try to imagine
what the valley would be like with a four-lane expressway
through it, but I can't. It would be a completely different
place, probably a place where no one would come to play
by the creek any more.
Christine
Wilson is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster
University.
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