On Cheaha's banks, we admired snails and mussels and netted at least five brilliant-hued species of shiner, a type of minnow. But it was a shock as we paddled from Cheaha into a dark, sluggish Choccolocco. For several depressing moments, I was struck dumb by the contrast. Cheaha looked and felt like a cool drink of ice water, next to Choccolocco's warm coffee dregs.While Choccolocco and many of its tributaries originate in the protected Talladega Mountains, the major creek has the longer, more arduous path through farmland and the fringes of urban-industrial areas. More than 90 companies have permits to discharge either wastewater or storm water directly into Choccolocco or its tributaries. State records indicate that at least 11 companies violated their permit limits in the last two years. Some have been cited numerous times.
It's harder to estimate the impact from construction projects and regular runoff from highways, agricultural fields and subdivisions. Everything in the Anniston-Oxford area - from a PCB molecule to a drop of motor oil to a loose pile of dirt - eventually runs down into Choccolocco Creek. But you can get a visual. Just visit the lower creek after a long rainstorm. It'll be brown, with floating Wal-Mart bags and perhaps another stray refrigerator.
Many millions of dollars have been poured into controlling erosion and flooding along Choccolocco. Many millions more have been spent investigating industrial pollution from Monsanto Co. and other Anniston area industries. Even with improvements, Choccolocco has maintained a reputation for being miserable and dangerous - "a sad, little stream," one regulator once told me.
To those who familiarize themselves with Choccolocco, however, the creek tells more than just a story of pollution.
Cheaha to Jackson Shoals
Many miles downstream of the cities of Calhoun County, Choccolocco begins to shed its municipal stench.
In April, the creek seemed murky for our first half-mile. It was a silent float, punctuated by our exclamations when we saw fish swimming by the canoes or jumping downstream.
As we paddled further, dark sediment banks climbed as high as a one-story building. Frightened cows galloped alongside, appearing as dark silhouettes rumbling against a clear blue sky. Although much of the creek is fenced from bovine intruders, we observed the muddy, churned-up beaches where they come to drink from the creek.
The long, skinny shape of a gar - a genus of fish with a bony, spear-like snout - sped past my canoe, causing me to pause in mid-stroke. Being wholly ignorant about freshwater fish, I didn't think such bizarre, prehistoric creatures populated creeks. Now I know a biologist inspected a gar six feet in length in Choccolocco shoal waters. Several species of gar range from Quebec to Cuba. They have needle-like teeth, and their eggs are known to be poisonous to humans.
As we paddled this stretch, Brad McLane brought out his fly rod, hoping to catch and release shade-loving bass.
Slowly, Choccolocco spread out. Our canoes ventured into lake-size pools.
Reflecting the open sky, Choccolocco shifted from brown to bright blue and widened to almost a quarter mile in places. "That's more pool than I expected on that stretch of creek," Pierson said later.
Here, we saw hawks, herons and an anxious mother wood duck bobbing on the water with her ducklings. She hurried her tiny chicks to the bank, quacking at us in aggrieved tones.
We labored against a breathy little wind and slowly made our way to Jackson Shoals, one of the most beautiful stretches of Choccolocco. Our first stop was at the old Jackson dam, site of a former mill.
We ate sandwiches on the rock dam, and I had my first lesson in fly-fishing from Beth Wentzel, who learned it from her father in British Columbia. Standing in a marsh at the base of the dam, I felt like a moron, snapping my right arm in the air. But eventually, it began to feel like a natural movement, almost trance-inducing.
After lunch, we lumbered into our boats and paddled down into the shoals - shallow, blue water flowing fast over a wide bed of large rocks, pond weed and not-quite-blooming shoal lilies, best known as Cahaba lilies. "That is gorgeous," exclaimed Brad McLane. We squinted at the lily plants, and I tried to imagine what they might look like a few weeks later when they would blossom.
We gazed uneasily at a water moccasin as he swam by the canoe.
Our last hour was spent on a small grassy island, in mute rebellion against the lowering sun. With Pierson in charge, Beth and I helped drag a net along the creek bottom, stomping our waterlogged sneakers in the attempt to scare up tiny fish.
Thirteen shiner species have been located in Choccolocco Creek. But unlike those we found in Cheaha Creek, the two or three species we found in Choccolocco are not as sensitive to pollution, said Pierson, who has found the endangered blue shiner only in the upper reaches of the creek.
Despite many attempts, we found few shiner. Attention turned to the larger fish. We traded pleasantries with several other people who fished from the opposite banks, also trying to catch bass.
Instead, we found plenty of brim, and from my spot on the beach, I hooked my first and only fish of the trip - a red-eared sunfish. McLane picked it out of the water, careful to avoid its sharp fins. Then, he put it back.
Grumbling at the setting sun, we headed back into the boats and toward home.
The headwaters
Here is the opposite end, the origins of Choccolocco.
To go upstream was, I knew, to go backward: from metropolitan din to ancient silence.1
If one considers Choccolocco as a line of time as well as space, the headwaters is the primitive zone, ruled by wild flora and fauna.
The stream begins its 70-mile trip to the Coosa River in a rugged area of the Talladega National Forest in Cleburne County. Tiny rivulets flow down some of the tallest mountains in the forest, joining each other in remote forks to form the pristine headwaters of Choccolocco.
I drove here twice with Francine and Bruce Hutchinson, Anniston residents who successfully fought for creation of the nearby Dugger Wilderness. Another time, I visited the headwaters with Katherine Eddins and Mark Pentecost, Jacksonville residents who hope to generate interest in conserving private land in the Choccolocco watershed.
Their nonprofit group, the Chattowah Open Land Trust, has funding from Solutia Inc. to investigate the potential for securing conservation easements in the Choccolocco watershed. A skeptic might consider it an strange alliance - conservationists and Solutia, the spin-off company that inherited Monsanto Company's pollution mess - but the couple is focused on the potential ecological benefits.
Pentecost, a native of northeast Alabama, is familiar with the headwaters of Choccolocco because his family used to travel here to trap mammals and gather wild ginseng.
Deer and turkey still make this mountainous terrain a sportsman's paradise. Protected by the Talladega National forest and the Choccolocco Wildlife Management Area, the upper watershed was one of the first places in Alabama where conservation officials re-introduced deer and turkey in the 1940s.
Huge loblolly pine, tulip trees, white oak and exotic big-leaf and cucumber magnolia line the steep banks of Choccolocco and its tributaries. There are few human trails, but well-trampled horse trails wind around the creek, and deer paths line the ridges.
Outside of the national forest, the scenery is more variable. Whether family farms or wooded lots, "these are the types of places we'd like to help protect," said Pentecost, driving his pickup along rural roads in northern Calhoun County.
Each time I visited the headwaters, my entry point was Forest Road 540, a snaky dirt road running south from Liberty Hill - a dot on the map just over the Cleburne County line - over Rattlesnake Mountain to Coleman Lake in the Shoal Creek district of the national forest.
Mostly, we inspected flowers and plants.
In early October, the Hutchinsons showed me large clumps of one of the rare flowers of Alabama, jamesianthus alabamensis, a type of yellow aster. Jamesianthus, also called the Alabama warbonnet, is so obscure it has yet to be included in wildflower guides. Since its official naming in 1940 by a pair of well-known botanists, it has been documented in only a few spots in Alabama and Georgia.
Loretta Winegar and Ms. Hutchinson, both former graduate students working on their master's theses on native flora, found jamesianthus on Choccolocco Creek in 1994 and 1995.
The pretty aster with clasping leaves and tiny red inner petals grew on a sandy bank next to the Choccolocco Creek ford on Forest Road 540. "It has a long, long bloom time," Mrs. Hutchinson remarked.
That day, the yellow profusion of the jamesianthus bed was the launching point for a long wading trip upstream with Mrs. Hutchinson. We sloshed through the clearest water I've seen in Alabama. We hoped to chase Choccolocco upstream until it dwindled to tiny tributaries.
Even though our trip occurred in October, the driest month of the year, the upper tributaries were gushing with plentiful, cold water. I saw hundreds of tiny minnows and snails. Ferns, flowers and large tulip trees framed the wide, shallow stream.
Mrs. Hutchinson pointed out unusual flowers growing on the banks as we waded upstream. She found pink turtleheads, related to snapdragons, bending over the stream next to a beaver dam. They indeed looked like pastel-hued turtle heads.
She pointed out tag alder, a small, deciduous tree bearing tiny cones. "That was one of the top trees for Native Americans," Mrs. Hutchinson commented. To this day, some people use poultices of tag alder bark for skin ailments and digestive problems.
After an hour or two, we gave up for the day and turned around.
A month later, we returned to 540 and drove further south on Rattlesnake Mountain. Carrying a topo map and GPS locator, we hiked down a gully and followed a dry branch to a flowing tributary. When we finally hit Choccolocco Creek, we hiked upstream to a large V-spot - one of five or six forks that form the headwaters.
It was a beautiful spot - one stream flowed in quietly, and the second skipped down a rock staircase from the mountain. They joined paths under the shade of a small, scabby hardwood.
The middle creek
This is the gist of Choccolocco, comprising more than 50 miles from White Plains to Eastaboga.
If I had to distill it down to a phrase, I'd say this long stretch contains the most beautiful and ugliest portions of Choccolocco.
It is fed from a narrow valley cradled by the western ridges of Dugger and Choccolocco mountains and the eastern ridges of Rattlesnake, Brymer and Horseblock mountains.
The creek winds through the fertile floodplain of the Choccolocco Valley and flows under the shade of hardwoods through cow pastures and private woodlands. Many beautiful spots here, such as the Blue Pond Spring, are blocked from pedestrian or road access by "No Trespassing" signs.
Today, if you want to see middle Choccolocco, you have two choices: ride by canoe or spot check the creek at the rural road bridges and highway bridges from White Plains in western Calhoun County to Eastaboga in northern Talladega County.
One recent afternoon, I rode along with biologist Dr. David Whetstone to visit bridge crossings from White Plains to Oxford. All of these bridges crossed portions of Choccolocco hardest hit by agricultural runoff and illegal dumping.
In White Plains, chemical runoff from cotton fields, nurseries and sod farms enter an algae-choked Cottaquilla Creek. Where Cottaquilla dumps into Choccolocco downstream, "there's chemical runoff" and an absence of water insects that suggests that too many nutrients escape into the creek. "There's nothing in the creek there," said Whetstone, chair of the biology department at Jacksonville State University.
We visited former oxbow areas, historic loops of Choccolocco diverted by the National Soil Conservation Service on behalf of farmers. Despite the diversions, the oxbows remain wet and provide harbor for at least one wetland species not often seen here, the overcup oak, with its unusual, cup-shaped acorns.
On another trip, I canoed from Iron City to the Blue Pond Spring, a large, round hole impounded by a beaver but slowly leaking to the stream below. Leaf litter exuded a strong sulfur smell, and it was hard to tell, in late summer, how this slack water could ever be called blue.
Down past Oxford, I canoed many times in what local folk flippantly call "PCB water." That's because of the high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls - a family of chemicals believed to cause cancer, intellectual loss and other problems - found in Choccolocco sediment and fish since 1969. PCBs are proven to have severe impacts on fish and animals: sex reversals in turtles, liver and skin disorders in fish and poor bird reproduction.
In Choccolocco, PCBs attach to fine-grained sediment in the water and travel with the dirt as it rolls downstream. Scientists suspect large "sinks" of PCBs have collected in the backwaters of Snow Creek, where it enters Choccolocco in Oxford, as well as the bottom of Logan Martin Lake.
In 1971, the year Monsanto ended its liquid PCB production, a local fishery biologist found nothing but non-native goldfish and shad in lower Choccolocco. Blaming industrial pollution and sewage, Dave Kelley said, "as far as I'm concerned, it's a dead creek."
Landowners noted the sudden disappearances of turtles, snakes and frogs in the 1970s and 1980s. Mussels also grew scarce.
In addition to PCBs, like many other creeks, Choccolocco harbors harmful bacteria, present in varying amounts depending on the location and time of year.
Yet, it wasn't hard for me to forget the invisible pollution as I ventured through beautiful shoals, inspected turtles and snails and even munched on sweet, wild persimmon several miles downstream of Oxford.
Clearly the fish and wildlife have rebounded to a certain extent.
On my final canoe trip last week, Ms. Eddins and I launched from Flat Top Bridge in Silver Run and paddled six hours to Eastaboga.
We peered at the creek bottom and often forgot to watch ahead for rocks, which lengthened the trip and caused several hilarious disasters. "It makes it more fun," Ms. Eddins said, considering the bright side as we bounced off a rock and sped backward into a shallow pool.
As the afternoon lengthened, Choccolocco became leaden gray, and the already golden foliage turned to liquid fire in the glow of the setting sun. Wood ducks burst out of the banks in quiet explosions, torpedoing over our heads in perfect silence.
Ms. Eddins pointed out white-barked sycamores, reaching slim limbs elegantly over the creek banks and dropping their flat autumn leaves in the water like small handkerchiefs.
"Did you read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek?" she asked. "She talks about the sycamores."
Later, I grabbed the book from the spot on my shelf where it has sat half-read for two years.
Sycamores are among the last trees to go into leaf; in the fall, they are the first to shed. They make sweet food in green broad-leaves for a while - leaves as wide as plates - and then go wild and wave their long white arms.3
I read a little more and put it down, a little worn down by Annie Dillard's violent torrent of imagery and metaphysics.
I gathered my own ruminations about Choccolocco.
I decided this creek might be admired just as well as a tinkering brook in West Virginia. Perhaps more, because it has proven to be such a worthy foe against pollution.
As Dr. Whetstone says, "It's a mighty, mighty stream."
