The article “Reaching the Light of Day” (Orion, May 23, 2024) is compelling if you’re interested in hidden hydrology. Author Corinne Segal recounts some of the larger themes and projects around “ghost streams,” including work in New York, Baltimore, Auckland, Istanbul, and a handful of other locations. Beyond some of the projects they note, the article poses a larger question regarding our ancient ‘kinship’ with water. This struck me as essential to the conversations around hidden hydrology, so took this as an opportunity to explore further. Various nuances and definitions of kinship span from biological to sociological. For a reference point, I grabbed this quick definition:
kin·ship /ˈkinˌSHip/, noun. blood relationship; a sharing of characteristics or origins.
One could make a case for both parts of this definition. While we’re not technically related, there is a physical biochemical connection between our bodies and water, as our lives ultimately depend on water for our existence. Thus ‘blood relationship’ takes a literal dimension: healthful when we talk of life-sustaining properties; harmful when we talk about, for instance, toxicity due to water pollution. The negatives are often of our own doing, caused by abuse or neglect of our ‘kin’ impacting our bodies in negative ways with disease. It is a kinship of reciprocity, reflecting a link between our treatment of our ‘kin’ and how it is tied physically to our survival.
The second definition here is most compelling, diving into our deeper emotional relationship with water. The ‘sharing of characteristics or origins’ resonates powerfully with our relationship with water. This summer I read the 2023 posthumously published dialogue with Barry Lopez and writer Julia Martin titled Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects. Much of the discussion focused on how Lopez engaged that kinship early in life through language, as a way to know, only later in life, expanding the relationship through a deeper dive into “syntax” to develop understanding and attain wisdom.
An excerpt from his elaborates on this idea:
“I think when you’re young you want to learn the names of everything. This is a beaver, this is spring Chinook, this is a rainbow trout, this is osprey, elk over there. But it’s the syntax that you really are after. Anybody can develop the vocabulary. It’s the relationships that are important. And it’s the discerning of this three-dimensional set of relationships that awakens you to how complex this is at any one moment.”
The only way to develop these three-dimensional relationships is through consistent contact, which requires occupation of and awareness of place. As he visits and revisits his local McKenzie River, he partakes in constant unfolding. He notes some of these observations: “The water has a slightly different color during the four seasons, depending on how much snow and glacial melt is in it. And the parts of the river that are not visible in the summer are visible in the winter, because of the loss of leaves of deciduous trees.”
This connection with water, as Lopez describes it, requires spending time physically interacting with these environments, and conducting actual visits with our ‘kin’ to deepen ties. The wrinkle here is how we adapt this approach for the ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’, those hidden streams and buried waterways that no longer have a discernable physical presence. The relationship is no longer about observation in the present but about memory. This perhaps is similar to thinking about our lost kin, to think of lost streams in terms of death. In this way. This could be a way to reframe the relationship as grief and loss, allowing us to draw from the deep well of resources to rethink how we remember and celebrate those lost relationships.
I’m reminded of one of the origin stories of Hidden Hydrology, with author David James Duncan recounting a tale in his fabulous book “My Story As Told By Water”, of the death of one of his favorite fishing spots in his stomping grounds east of Portland:
“At six-thirty or so on a rainy April morning, I crept up to a favorite hole, threaded a worm on a hook, prepared to cast – then noticed something impossible: there was no water in the creek. …I began hiking, stunned, downstream. The aquatic insects were gone, barbershop crawdads gone, catfish, carp, perch, crappie, bass, countless sacrificial cutthroats, not just dying, but completely vanished. Feeling sick, I headed the opposite way, hiked the emptied creekbed all the way to the source, and there found the eminently rational cause of the countless killings. Development needs roads and drainfields. Roads and drainfields need gravel. Up in the gravel pits at the Glisan Street headwaters, the creek’s entire flow had been diverted for months in order to fill two gigantic new settling ponds. My favorite teacher was dead.”
It is sometimes challenging to think of hidden hydrology through the lens of grief, but you can feel Duncan’s pain at the loss of this urban creek. It’s one cut in the death of a thousand cuts that makes up the global tragedy — the devastation wrought throughout the world on waterbodies in the name of progress. However, the impact is muted for several reasons. First, we, unlike Duncan, are often not around when most of these creeks and streams existed in the first place, so we don’t comprehend what we lost. Second, there are remnants and surviving resources that we can still connect within our cities, so the erasure is not complete enough to equal extinction. Finally, these places fade from memory, and, out of sight, out of mind, we forget as we trod over their buried pipes and filled depression blissfully unaware.
When we lack a strong presence of these historical remnants, we tend to feel greater disconnection, the subtle traces not sufficient for us to feel a connection. This drives our need to reveal and reconnect using a variety of methods: artistic, metaphorical, and ecological. This is hidden hydrology as a practice: the reason for us to study old maps, trace the lines of old creeks, and attempt to restore kinship.
Hidden hydrological features, unlike humans, can physically be restored and brought back to life in a sense. Beyond just memory, we have the potential for rebirth, through our creative endeavors: historical ecology mapping, painting the routes of streams on roadways, ecological restoration, and daylighting. “Back from the dead” seems a morbid way to think of the processes of restoration, but it gives us the ability to reconnect and restore.
Several other themes can intersect and expand this idea. I recently re-read a portion of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of the Grammar of Animacy. I am struck by the similar themes of kinship, as she discusses how we relate to and reference these ecological systems. An excerpt from an Orion article from 2017, “Robin Wall Kimmerer on the Language of Animacy” hints at this idea:
If it’s just stuff, we can treat it any way that that we want. But if it’s family, if it’s beings, if they’re other persons we have ecological compassion for them… Speaking with the grammar of animacy brings us all into this circle of moral consideration. Whereas when we say “it,” we set those beings, those “things,” as they say, outside of our circle of moral responsibility.”
We connect our morality to things we understand. Another theme that this also evokes is the writings of Robert Macfarlane, particularly when he speaks of language and how words connect us to the natural world, another form of ‘kinship’. I wrote eons ago about this lost language of nature, including Macfarlane and Anne Whiston Spirn, both of who also have written about lost rivers. Along with Lopez and Kimmerer, these authors prod us to rethink our ability to connect with our kin, hidden or visible, degraded or pristine.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how we can develop and expand these relationships, our ‘kinship’, specifically with places no longer visible and viable. Are there good examples you know of where lost relationships have been reestablished? Do you feel a kinship or even see this as a goal, with other species or with the wider landscape?
Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 11/06/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/22/25.