In our last installment, Bill wrote about a walk through the Cedar Ridge Preserve. Today we find him sauntering along Turtle Creek.
Law Man Walking
By Bill Holston
During the week, if I have time, I try to walk during the lunch hour. I find that getting outside during the work week is a great stress reducer. Not to mention, it burns a few calories, to free up some room for those tasty Good 2 Go tacos that have recently arrived in my neighborhood. Actually, I find I’m more productive at work after I’ve had a walk. It’s good to get away from the phone and computer terminal for about 45 minutes.
I quit walking with an iPod several years ago because I prefer to leave space and quiet for thought. I also enjoy the bird calls and sounds of wind as I walk. Quite often, I find that my mood instantly brightens by getting outside during the day. It also helps me to appreciate the seasons. The one exception is summer. It turns out clients and fellow workers prefer their lawyer not to be sweat drenched. Go figure.
I’m fortunate that my office is about a 10-minute walk from the Katy Trail. Yeah, I’m the guy wearing a tie on the trail. It’s clearly not as isolated as a lot of the trails I walk on. However, it’s close to my office, and it’s actually quite pretty in places. For the last few years, I’ve walked several times a week on the Katy Trail. About a year ago, I decided to investigate the older Turtle Creek Trail. In many ways, I prefer it. It is closer to the creek, and I’m much more likely to see wildlife. I’ve often seen wood ducks, great blue herons, and red tail hawks.
Last week, to create a loop walk, I combined a walk on both trails. I catch the Turtle Creek Trail by walking down Fitzhugh from my office and then down Stonebridge, which is where the Turtle Creek Trail starts. There’s a small park at the end of Stonebridge, where there are usually a large group of mallards and an occasional wood duck. There is one street crossing at Blackburn, which has a narrow sidewalk and requires some attention. The trail continues past the former home of the Dallas Theater Center, the Kalita Humphreys Theater, and passes under Lemmon. If I don’t have time for a longer walk, I walk over to the Katy Trail entrance at Hall and return to my office. Last week I had time to make take the trail all the way to Reverchon Park.
The trail is a wide sidewalk, which goes right along the creek all the way to Hall. After the trail crosses under Bowen, it becomes a boardwalk, attached to the walls. The boardwalk is in pretty good shape, but is going to deteriorate eventually, because of the exposure to water. As I walked along the trail, I heard the distinctive rattle of a belted kingfisher. I watched it skim the water, swoop down to catch a fish, and then perch on a cottonwood tree. I sat and watched it until a mockingbird dive bombed and chased the kingfisher upstream.
There are several places along the trail where homeless people appear to sleep at night. I see their bedrolls and cardboard sleeping pads under the bridges. There used to be a large homeless camp off the Katy Trail where it crosses over Cedar Springs. I occasionally see these guys sitting in the sun along the banks of Turtle Creek. They’ve never been a bother. I’ve never even been approached for a hand-out. But I suppose it might not be safe after dark. I think it’s a pretty good perspective giver, to see that people live under bridges, before I head back to my office.
The next part of the trail is where you really experience one of the downsides of urban walking. This portion of the trail is filled with trash brought by the rains that occasionally flood the area. It’s almost all plastic bottles, bags, and fast food trash. As you walk along, the trees are all filled with what a friend calls “urban prayer flags,” the ubiquitous plastic grocery bag. Every year we junk 4 trillion to 5 trillion of these bags. An estimated 1 percent of those are blown out of trash containers and fill trees and bushes. Last year, my friend Dylan Hollingsworth took photos of a jam of these plastic bottles on White Rock Creek.
As I walk along Turtle Creek, I see that it really was and is a very pretty place. It creates small rapids in places and is filled with fish, ducks and turtles. It really is a shame to see the creek spoiled with all this preventable litter. Haven’t any of you seen that ad with the crying Native American in the canoe? By the way, turns out he was Sicilian, but still.
After seeing all of this trash in trees, I’ve really changed how I live. I finally quit using any plastic grocery bags. I had accumulated tons of reusable ones. I keep them in my car. I’ve also quit using styrofoam or disposable cups. I keep a nice travel mug in my car, and I’ve already developed the habit of using it. A styrofoam cup takes 50 years to decompose, an aluminum can takes 200 years to decompose. The ever-present plastic bottle takes 450 years to decompose. I never buy bottled water, and I keep a Nalgene water bottle in my daypack. Really, if we all made these simple changes, we’d dramatically reduce litter.
Eventually the Turtle Creek Trail enters Reverchon Park. In 1915, the city acquired this land for a park. Later it was named after Julien Reverchon, a member of the La Reunion utopian community. Reverchon was a botanist who collected more than 2,600 species and 20,000 specimens of Texas plants prior to his death in 1905. The park was improved during the ’20s as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. The use of stone is a real hallmark of the craftsmen that built these park improvements. My dad was in the CCC (another Depression-era public works project). He went from a tenant farming cotton farm in Alabama to work in national forests in Northern California. White Rock Lake contains several bridges and picnic areas that were built by the CCC there. I really don’t see why something like this wouldn’t work again. Think about that next time you cross one of those old stone bridges in a state park.
I love walking up the hill back to the Katy trail. I climb the stone steps and past stone seats, tables, and walls that adorn the hillside. At the top, I entered the Katy Trail to wander back to the office. The entire walk took about an hour.
I love the Katy Trail, particularly with the newly constructed entrances along the way. By combining it with the more natural areas along Turtle Creek, I managed to get a little slice of nature before getting back to the next round of phone calls for a client before the weekend.
