One thing I've been trying to do during this pandemic is take some walks and get to know my part of town a little better. Several days ago I took my camera with me and shot a few photos, including the one above.
One thing every landscape has is some creeks to drain water. In some places they're impossible not to notice; mountainous areas that have a lot of precipitation are a good example. But in other places, including the heart of cities like mine, they're easy to overlook. More often than not they've been channelized and lined with concrete, or even buried underground. Street gutters and stormwater tunnels are simply substitutes for the creeks that drained the countryside before the city was built.
Pictured above is Cypress Creek, a tributary of the Wolf River. Cypress Creek originates south of a neighborhood known as Chickasaw Gardens, flows in a northwesterly direction, and enters the Wolf in North Memphis not far from the old Firestone plant. It drains a pretty good swath of the northern half of Memphis, including my neighborhood.
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I don't know what the current status of the creek is, but just a few years ago, it was some of the most toxic water in the state. Contaminated by Velsicol. A family member who worked in a water testing lab had to don a hazmat suit and work with these water samples under a hood.
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