More Thoughts about Kayaking Chartiers Creek

 The cool thing about kayaking is that it gives you someplace to escape to when you're stuck doing things you don't love.  Whether I'm working at my desk, moderating some fruitless argument about administrative details, absently pondering my reply to some email, or forcing myself to be creative and productive on a deadline, I can always slip away--in my mind--to some recent cruise down the Chartiers.  You might think I'm all ears, that you have my undivided attention, but in reality, I'm gliding over rocks, choosing my channel between shallow rapids, drifting in the shade of sycamores.  That's the only reason I keep a blog anyway: to revisit my adventures.  (I'm not narcissistic enough to believe that anyone out there is waiting for me to update my blog.) 

Actually, I've been doing a lot of research about Chartiers Creek online.  There's a faithful handful of people who care about it and who work to mitigate the industrial damage that's been done to it.  Water quality is a big issue for a stream like this one, whose headwaters are up in the coalfields and frackfields, and whose mouth opens into the Ohio after passing through old milltowns with their dead and dying factories and their woefully outdated infrastructures--including their methods of sewage treatment and discharge.  The efforts of these conservationists have gone a long way toward restoring a waterway that used to run orange with industrial waste.  But there's a lot of room for improvement.

In places, the Chartiers looks like the Los Angeles River: canalized and enclosed by concrete pylons and ugly cement walls.  In other places, quite nearby, the same stream could almost pass for some little-known waterway deep in the wilderness.  I'm also thinking about tackling the Raccoon Creek, out in Beaver County--not the lake inside the state park, but the actual stream that the park is named for, which only touches the park's easternmost edge.  It's apparently navigable into June, and after a good rain.  The Raccoon is supposedly wilder than the Chartiers but also a little less accessible and often obstructed by fallen trees.  I know a good put-in spot near Kramer Road at Hillman State Park.

I like using the definite article before the name of a creek or stream: "the Raccoon," "the Chartiers."  It sounds vaguely knowledgeable, as if I'm an old riverhand.  Anybody out there ever kayak Raccoon Creek?  Not the lake at Raccoon Creek State Park, but the creek itself?