One of my favorite gifts this Christmas was a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s new book, “Is a River Alive? Macfarlane is a remarkably gifted English writer who has made his reputation as a nature and travel writer. His newest book deals with our stewardship of our creeks and rivers, a subject dear to my heart. Philosophically, it addresses the concept that “rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law”. Dr. Seuss invented the Lorax and Hollywood supplied the voice of Danny DeVito to “speak for the trees”; perhaps Macfarlane speaks for the rivers.
Mr. Macfarlane currently lives near Cambridge, where he is a member of the faculty. He begins this book by discussing the history of a tiny stream which begins in a spring not far from his home and serves as a tributary for the River Cam. He dates the origin of his stream from the end of the glacial period in the English Midlands, about 12,000 years ago. This immediately opened up a rabbit hole for me, “How old is my beloved Chartiers Creek?”
Chartiers Creek has been a major interest of mine for nearly as long as I can remember. As boys, my friends and I spent many hours “over the hill” exploring the valley between Bridgeville and Mayview. Fishing in the Blue Ponds, ice-skating on the creek on the rare occasions it froze, crossing the creek on the swinging bridge en route to Mayview Cave – Tom Sawyer had nothing on us! One winter Paul Rankin, Ed Weise, and I even ran a muskrat trap line, unsuccessfully, along the creek. Several times the creek flooded extensively, covering the full width of the valley. When it receded, we were startled to find so many large fish trapped in leftover puddles. All of this was overpowered by our indignation that society had allowed this once pristine stream to be polluted.
We know quite a bit about Chartiers Creek’s history for the last century or so. We know that it functioned as a sewer for domestic wastes prior to the establishment of ALCOSAN. We know that numerous industrial facilities dumped everything they wanted to dispose of into the creek prior to enactment of the Clean Water Act. We know that abandoned underground coal mines eventually filled with ground water and that their overflow produced massive quantities of iron oxide, often turning the creek an obnoxious shade of orange. And, we also know that the cessation of discourteous practices and the judicious investment in facilities to treat abandoned mine drainage has dramatically reduced pollution recently.
We also know that the course of Chartiers Creek has been altered in recent years. The James G. Fulton Flood Control Project, authorized by Congress in 1965, widened, deepened, and realigned the channel. A major realignment cut off the meander from Presto to Bridgeville’s Lower End and Woodville with a much more direct route, leaving only a small trickle in the old channel until it reaches its confluence with McLaughlin Run. The project did indeed reduce flood severity in the Lower End, at least the portion generated by Chartiers Creek. Bridgeville Borough is still pursuing a project to control McLaughlin Run in that area. We also know that a meander south of Heidelberg, around what is now Raceway Plaza, was cut off early in the 1900s. Evidence of it, including the Woodville steam plant stack, is still apparent from I-79.
One possibility for the birth date of Chartiers Creek, of course, is to mimic Macfarlane and consider the end of the last Ice Age in western Pennsylvania; its effect on drainage patterns is well documented. This involves a discussion of Lake Monongahela and 750,000 BC, a topic that warrants a column of its own. I am confident that the Chartiers valley was in place before it.
Let’s presume that Chartiers Creek existed long before the Ice Age. How long? The next candidate for a birth date is the establishment of the Allegheny Plateau. According to the plate tectonics advocates, a major event occurred about two hundred and sixty million years ago. When the surface of the earth cooled enough to solidify into a crust eighty miles thick, the crust was subdivided into a dozen or so independent plates floating on a semi-liquid core. The portions of each plate composed of heavy rock sunk deeper than the lighter portions, forming oceans and continents. Each plate moves slowly (a fraction of an inch a year). Eventually two continental plates (North America and Africa) crashed into each other, during the formation of super-continent Pangaea.
The collision, despite proceeding very slowly, had so much momentum that it pushed up mountains on the east coast of North America in three major stages. The final uplift, the Allegheny Orogeny, produced ancestors of the Appalachians, fifteen thousand feet high. The reaction to the collision resulted in a reversal of direction. A rift opened up in the middle of what is now the Atlantic Ocean and the continents began to move apart. For millions of years the mountains eroded, with much of the detritus being deposited to the northwest, forming the Allegheny Plateau. It is a fairly level region which includes most of southern New York State, all of Pennsylvania west of Allegheny Mountain, eastern Ohio, and western West Virginia. It is easy to speculate that this relatively stable state of equilibrium made it possible for current drainage systems to develop, possibly as long ago as fifty million years. To be conservative I will pick a date in the middle of the Oligocene Epoch, say thirty million years ago. Happy Birthday, Chartiers Creek!
Is thirty million years long enough for a modest creek like Chartiers to carve out its mile-wide valley? Is it long enough for the stream to cut down three hundred feet from the surface of the surrounding hills? Certainly seems reasonable to me.