Inspired by Hamilton Creek in Wildwood, Missouri, “Hamilton Creek Bridge” is a contemporary nature poem by Iris Lennox about clear water, limestone, and the quiet forces that shape the landscape over time.
I stop where cedar shadows fall across the weathered rail, and lean above the narrow draw where water threads the shale.
It finds a seam the color of old bone beneath the moss, then slips between the sleeping stones without a splash or pause.
The creek is scarcely wide enough to trouble any map. A branch lets go. A single leaf drops through the sunlight’s trap.
It circles once in amber light, then catches in a bend where grains of sand, as bright as salt, begin their patient wend.
Rain gathers breath from oak and fern before it finds this place. It turns faintly acid as it falls against the limestone face.
Not all at once. One crystal first. One edge too small to see. A hollow deepens grain by grain beneath the sycamore tree.
A swallow skims. The bridge holds still. The afternoon grows warm. Below, the water keeps its hand around the selfsame form.
I watch it pass beneath my feet with neither haste nor sound, wearing through the living rock the way roots enter ground.
Once home to more than two thousand people, Times Beach, Missouri, is now part of Route 66 State Park, its former streets winding through grass, wetlands, and trees.
Grass grows high along the path, seed heads bending in the July heat. Cottonwoods lift their silver leaves and turn them over in the wind.
Somewhere beyond the trees, the Meramec moves brown and slow. Cicadas start and stop. A turkey disappears into the sumac, leaving one branch shaking behind her.
I walk where the path bends gently, following its long, deliberate curve through Queen Anne's lace and clover.
For years, I've assumed the curve was shaped by the land.
I think the trees have drawn it there, that roots and rain have persuaded the path to turn a little to the left.
But the curve was here before the trees.
This was a street.
The slightly hidden marsh beside me had an address. There were mailboxes here, porch steps, garden hoses, bicycles dropped in yards at dinner time.
A woman shakes a white sheet in the sun. A screen door strikes its frame. Someone calls a child home before dusk makes the river invisible.
I hear no names being called.
Still, I stand in the middle of the old road while cicadas stitch their noise through the trees, and for a moment the grass seems crowded.
They sprayed the roads with oil to keep the dust from rising.
The streets were unpaved then. Cars sent the dry earth climbing into open windows and onto porches, over laundry, into kitchens, into the mouths of children playing outside.
So they paid a man to settle it.
He came with a truck and spread oil over the roads, darkening the dust, pressing it back into the earth.
Such a small sentence:
to keep the dust down.
To keep it from settling on windowsills, on supper plates, on the faded blue jeans drying in the sun.
The road kept what it was given, accustomed to service.
Eleven summers pass. Children ride bicycles over it. Rain darkens it. The sun warms it. Women open their windows in April.
Then the river rises.
It enters the houses without knocking, climbs the stairs, lifts chairs from kitchen floors, pulls photographs from drawers.
And when the water folds back into its comfortable rhythm, it leaves the secret in the mud.
I walk here now with sunlight brushing across my shoulders.
No houses. No mailboxes. No white sheets rising in the wind.
Only the wetland, the mound, the old roads curving through the trees.
They burned the poisoned earth eventually, two hundred and sixty-five thousand tons of it, and buried what remained beneath the grass.
I've walked the hill where fragments of a town turn slowly in the earth—
a blue cup without its handle, one white button, the rusted hinge of a closet door, a marble lost beneath a child's bed, the broken mouth of a jar that once held peaches.
Things someone touched every day without knowing there would come a day when no one touched them again.
Now coneflowers open in the sun. Frogs call from the water. A red-winged blackbird bends a reed almost to the ground.
I have walked here for three years without knowing what was under my feet.
The streets, trails. The mound, a hill.
I watched deer step out at dusk where someone's back door used to be.
Today I stop beside the tall grass.
The wind passes over it and every green blade leans in the same direction.
Then rises.
Then leans again.
As if the earth is trying to remember a name.
—Iris Lennox
If you'd like to know more about the town beneath these trails, I wrote about the strange history of Times Beach and its second life as Route 66 State Park here.
