I am Burnt Bridge Creek. I wander through eight miles of Clark County starting in the east and carrying silt and water, septic tank effluent and sludge, tossed-about garbage, a few faithful bacteria and too few restoring algae to Vancouver Lake. I am the hope of Vancouver Lake. I am the playground of countless children and wandering tired adults. I am a haven for birds, otters, deer, meadow voles, shrews, pheasant. I wander through a city paved over and also serenely maintained lush farmlands and grazing areas. Without rain, I dwindle and stagnate. In storms, I grow more restless and now must bear the rush of city water, suburban water, mud from bulldozed developments and green belts destroyed, and the brown ribbon around the shores of the lake is my evidence that I no longer fill this county with fresh, clean water. Once I offered swimming holes for laughing children, fishing derbies where hundreds of children competed for my healthy, edible trout, salmon, perch, bass and blue gill. Once before the dawning of Clark County, I lured the Hudson Bay Company to my banks where beavers had ponded on my rich organic peat soil where now prime agricultural land is threatened by encroachment and right of eminent domain. Once orchards of plums, pears, peaches and filberts grew in tended rows, where now roads carry people to the edge of the lake and around. The quality of my water requires that I be posted along my length so that children will not swim in my cooling glades. My coliform count indicates that hepatitis, salmonella, other harmful bacteria and virus and parasites may lurk to endanger these children. The homes built with pride along my shores and in my drainage basin empty their wastes into septic tanks now old and often in disrepair, whose drainage fields flood sewage on the top of a clay formation and empty into my banks. Where once I carried with speed and splashing, I cleaned the water on my way, now my shores swollen with silt merely drain into the lake pond and dare the fish to exist for hopeful fisherman along the shore. Some see me as a possible paradise for urban man, with discovery trails, canoe runs, picnic areas, golf course, and quiet natural arbors. There is potential in my beaver ponds and in planned villages around storage ponds. An advisory committee technically debates my future and talks of hundred year floods and deals with statistics on oil, grease, lead, pesticides, herbicides, and storm runoff from rooftops and roads, talks of options left for my existence, of culverts, pond, water fees, and, worst of all, of miles and miles of cement banks for me. Inevitable is the rain, yet inevitable too the growing community of people. With these people comes life and hope and playful generations who will wander my shores, who will seek me. Will I still exist of green and growing – or of cement, and have disappeared down a storm drain to exist only somewhere invisible underground?
By Pat Blackwell
Distributed by the League of Women Voters of Clark County
August, 1977