The Small Stories: Exploring the Environmental Tales Behind the Kokosing River

I know that when I pressed submit on my application to Kenyon, the fantasy I pictured in my mind was one of long hikes in the so-called “BFEC” that the school couldn’t stop bragging about and hours spent writing along the scenic Kokosing River. The entire scene felt like an image taken out of a postcard. When I was accepted, I was allotted nine long, anxious months to further cultivate the fantasy. By the time I left Chicago, bags packed and class schedule printed, I had plotted out every stone, every tree, and every trail in my mind. I could almost smell the pines, feel the cold water run gently over my feet as I went wading in early autumn. Needless to say, when I arrived on campus and found the river for myself, the mirage of perfection was speedily washed away along with the rest of the leaves in the current.

Although the Kokosing may not have been what I imagined, my field notes gave me the closer look I needed to recognize the river’s rich history and striking power. I was used to environmental tales of intrigue: ancient, raging rivers entirely bisecting mountains, mountain ranges forming in cataclysmic tectonic collisions over eons, volcanoes rising at subduction zones and violently belching out the planet’s molten innards. It required a closer, more patient ear to parse out the stories which were not revealed by grandiose geographic landmarks, but which were instead whispered by more local, more personal, and much more modest landmarks.

The Kokosing River sauntered along with no particular rush, like it savored the journey exclusively and was still questioning the need for a destination in the first place. It was hardly visible on any map except those most local to Kenyon, and at its lowest point, one could walk from one side of the river to the other without soaking much more above the knees. But with patience, research, and hours spent crouching along the riverbank scribbling my observations in my small yellow notebook, I was able to make sense of its quiet storytelling and learn what it meant in the context of Ohio and Kenyon. And although it was not precisely the image I had in mind, now that I type this from home, I cannot help but feel that I miss the real thing significantly more than the wide, sparkling river I had first envisioned. It is the real, modest Kokosing which continues living out Ohio’s long geographic biography, almost invisibly eroding away bit by bit at the landscape, as rivers, glaciers, and streams in the area have done for hundreds of millions of years. It is one small name in a sea of creeks which have taken a plateau and carved from it a complex geographic landscape of hills, lakes, and more. Most of these creeks and rivers will remain unnamed, as their task of slowly but surely, quietly but effectively terraforming the land is hundreds of millions of years older than the advent of those humans who might have named them. Water erosion has always been, currently is, and will for many more eons continue to be the story of Kenyon’s landscape.

My explorations along the Kokosing began with three thin, superficially unremarkable lines carved into the sand.

The location at which I took my field notes was just past highway 229, directly underneath the bridge over the Kokosing, which, if one walks for long enough, eventually leads to the road to the BFEC. The bridge, lumbering and awkward in the context of the scenery, growled above me every ten minutes or so with the deep rumble of cars and trucks tumbling across it. It was as if somebody had taken the beautiful river around me and thoughtlessly graffitied “Mankind Was Here” all over it. Over the next few months, I would not only get used to the bridge, but learn to accept it as just another part of the river—the presence of humans is ubiquitous, and is just as much apart of the nature as the plant life and insects.

Almost every week, I would sit on the steep, sandy slope of the riverbank, concealed by the concrete above me. The hill started at the back wall of the bridge and stretched down to the periphery of the water. (In total, it stretched about fifteen feet long from wall to water, and at its highest point, about eight feet above the river’s surface.) Unassuming as it was, it was teeming with bugs noisily chirping in the brush, birds calling out to one another, and squirrels quietly going about their business in the diverse fauna.

I noticed three long, snaking lines embedded in the hill on my first day at the site. For the most part, they were no wider than a foot, and they extended from the top of the hill down to where it levelled out. With the exception of a few twists and curves, they were roughly parallel to one another. The fact that I observed these things, simple as they were, was a shock to me--I had never pictured myself "doing" science like that.

I began the activity unsure of what I would discover, but certain I would not enjoy it at all. When I imagined myself sitting by the Kokosing, I hadn't been picturing myself writing about mysterious paths in the sand or the thorns of a nearby plant; I had been picturing myself writing fiction or prose. I hadn’t yet realized that science and art often overlap in significant ways. Both can include vivid, evocative descriptions, and capture in writing excitement about what one sees. When I saw the three paths in the sand and began writing about them in my notes, my mind began to race with the same fluid thrill I experienced when writing for fun in my free time. I then knew my prediction about the activity had been wrong.

The next thing that caught my eye was the series of small rodent holes concealed in the brush across the hill. Similarly sized holes were scattered along the rightmost path, as well. It made sense to me that rodents would want easy access to the river from their tunnel system, so perhaps the paths were collapsed tunnels, or were dug with easy transport in mind. I would later come to find that the answer was more elusive, less clear, and significantly more nuanced than I’d initially thought.

The best theory I would eventually come up with for the origin of these paths was nestled neatly, though subtly, in one of the lessons from class. We at one point went over the history of the Appalachian Mountains—their formation, freakish and fascinating history, and eventual erosion into the battered, scarred mountains that now lie to our east. They were formed over the course of several hundred million years through not just one major orogeny (an orogeny being a mountain-building event), but three: the Taconic, Acadian, and Alleghenian orogenies. The last of these three, the Alleghenian, was the massive orogeny which formed the supercontinent Pangaea.

To summarize, when the Appalachians were formed, their weight resulted in a buckling and bending inwards of the crust, leading to an inland basin where eventually Ohio would come into its existence as we know it (Mitchell, 2019). As wind, rain, raging rivers, and more tore away at the Appalachians, their sediment was poured into the inland sea, and layer by layer, the sea was filled up with the geologic sawdust of natural erosion’s ferocious, though slow, attacks on the mountains (USGS, 2004). Essentially, as the mountains were torn down, the land in the basin was built up, until the Allegheny Plateau, which we now stand on, slowly broke the surface of the water and came into the modest beginnings of its existence.

A plateau, however, by definition, should be relatively level, and the landscape surrounding Kenyon is anything but. This was where, to my pleasant surprise, rivers like the Kokosing came bursting through the doors and onto center stage in Ohio history.

Ohio, for much of the last two million years, was covered in glaciers. The thickness and origin of these glaciers varied (namely, the Illinoisan glaciation stretched into Ohio approximately 300,000 years ago, while the Wisconsinan glaciation reached Ohio 24,000 years ago). During this period, called the Pleistocene Epoch but colloquially referred to as the Ice Age, central Ohio was covered in 1,000 feet of ice. Some other areas, such as the Erie Basin, were covered by ice a mile thick (Hansen, 1997).

The end of the Ice Age accelerated the creation of modern Ohio’s and Kenyon’s landscape, due to isostatic rebound.

Needless to say, glaciers are very, very heavy. A mile-thick layer of ice weighs down on the earth’s crust so much, in fact, that the crust bends underneath the pressure. One of the uppermost layers of the mantle is the asthenosphere, which contains rock that is not entirely molten, but is partway molten. It’s soft and malleable (Barrell, 1914, p. 680). In other words, the continents don’t shift as much as they float and bob their way across the earth. Thus, when enough weight is applied to the earth, as happened with the Appalachians, the crust bends inwards. To visualize this phenomenon, imagine setting a wafer on top of a bowl of pudding, and then placing a paperweight on top of the wafer. Suddenly, the wafer no longer floats on top of the pudding, but pushes inward, displacing the pudding. This phenomenon is called isostatic depression—a glacier (the paperweight) weighing down on the crust (the wafer), weighing down on the pudding (the asthenosphere) (Rasmussen, 2017).

When glaciers melt or move away, however, the crust fires back up with considerable force while the weight on the asthenosphere disappears. Half-baked rocks in the asthenosphere rush (or, more accurately, slowly crawl) back, refilling the space left by the ice sheet’s movement. The paperweight has been removed from the wafer, and the pudding returns to its original flat surface. This phenomenon is isostatic rebound (Rasmussen, 2017). It leads to a variety of consequences. Most importantly for Ohio, new rivers form, and preexisting rivers increase in ferocity and speed because the land doesn’t rise equally all over. As it rises, it tilts and bends as it shoots back up, and when it tilts and bends, water spreads and changes direction (Larson & Schaetzl, 2001, p. 537).

This phenomenon, isostatic rebound, is quite possibly what formed the Kokosing. Preexisting river valleys are uncovered and restored to their former glory. River valleys formed during the last or second to last glaciations chop away at the land with unending patience. And glacial meltwater joins these river valleys together, forming a new, complex web of rivers, all of them working together to carve away at the flat landscape. The hills around Kenyon were not lifted from the ground, but were instead carved from a plateau of layered Appalachian sediment (Mitchell, 2019). The Kokosing, to this day, continues tearing away at the landscape. Water is patient like that. It’s destructive and it’s a master of erosion, but it takes its time with its destruction.

Hidden in this environmental story lies the answer to my query about the three thin lines on the hill at my location. I had just about given up hope of finding out how they had been formed when I made my final visit to the spot under the bridge, on November 23. It was the day before I was going to be leaving Kenyon, and so I was distraught when I arrived at the hill and found the river entirely flooded. In the words of the first note I wrote that day, “I cannot get to the bottom of the sloped riverbank w/o submerging my feet in ice cold Kokosing water. It is my final day on campus, and the river floods. Maybe this is how it’s saying farewell, ha.”

The note was tongue-in-cheek, but it got at a very real sense of betrayal. After having spent months studying the river in its quiet beauty, it floods for the first time on the last day I’m able to visit it. If there were any way for an inanimate landform to raise a middle finger at me, that would be it.

I would typically wander around the small hill and the surrounding riverbank while taking notes, exploring and discovering what I could. With most of the area inaccessible, I was forced to take notes only on what I could see in my direct vicinity at the top of the hill. It was here, at the top, that I realized that the river was not insulting me with the flood; the flood was an unfortunate side effect of a present. This present took the unique form of an explanation for the three paths.

Essentially, I saw two things at the top of the hill: first, that the paths embedded in the hill started shallow, and their incisions got deeper and deeper the steeper the hill got. That pattern is likely the product of water flowing down the hill, taking the same paths every time—the paths of least resistance—and as the hill gets steeper, the speed of the water increases, producing a deeper cut in the sand (photos illustrating this phenomenon are attached).

Secondly, I noticed sediment being dragged along in the direction of the rainwater’s path. Sediment does not magically settle into the shape it did (again, photos of this phenomenon are attached)—the shape reflected that it was being dragged along in a particular direction. And sure enough, the direction it pointed matched flawlessly with the path the rainwater was taking—toward the paths.

What struck me was that this story, of the rainwater dragging along the sediment and slowly clawing away at the hill, is the exact same story as that of the Appalachians, and as that of the Kokosing River, but seen on a smaller scale. Water erosion fills every level of Ohio’s history—from the scale of mountains to creeks to paths no wider than my hand. Just as it was water that aided in the tearing down of the Appalachians, the production of Appalachian sediment, and its deposition in the inland basin, and just as it was water which took the Allegheny Plateau and carved from it our favorite hill upon which Philander Chase founded Kenyon, it was water which likely produced the three superficially insignificant paths which consumed a semester’s worth of field notes.

As I left the hill that day to go pack, still riding the high of my realization, I came to conclude that the river was not, in fact, cursing me out. It was offering me a parting gift. For me, it pulled back the curtains and thrust its inner gears into broad daylight for me to observe and love and write about, as I’m doing now. I look forward to returning to the Kokosing in August, and seeing what more there is for me to investigate and learn from.