“Buffalo Creek”

Buffalo Creek. Carrollton, GA.

26-May-2024

I was 24 when I decided to pick my life up and move it across state lines. It wasn’t so far—south Florida to north Georgia—but it felt far enough. I learned pretty quickly that once you’re more than a day’s drive away from home, far is far. New places, new people, a new job—and an added bonus: a whole new suite of species to learn. It felt like I was starting all over again.

In those early days, my 400-square-foot apartment felt more like a cardboard cage than a home. When the four walls started closing in, I took myself outside—and fortunately for me, this city had an abundance of parks and trails.

One of the closest was Buffalo Creek at the Hays Mill Greenbelt Trailhead. It astonished me that this spectacle was treated as nothing more than a casual little city park. To my Florida-girl eyes, it was a treasure.

Buffalo Creek wove throughout the city, but here, centuries of water and erosion had worn away the soil, exposing smooth, colorful granite beneath. Water cascaded between the boulders, creating a miniature tumbling waterfall. Families gathered for picnics, and children in water shoes and bucket hats splashed in the trickling creek. Further upstream, where the water slowed, insects daubed and dabbled across the surface. Muddy pawprints on the banks hinted that it served as a quiet respite for the local wildlife, too.

It was there—further upstream—that I often found myself after work, picking my way across the stones to find a dry perch somewhere in the middle. I went there often in those days, and almost always alone.

One evening, as I pulled out my paints and sketchbook, I marveled at the scene before me. For a while, before I even began painting, I just watched.

Leaves were tugged to and fro by the creek’s eddies, dragged briefly under before resurfacing downstream. Ants along the bank piled damp grains of mud around the entrance to their burrow. A short distance away, a small moth struck the water’s surface. Her wings clung helplessly to the tension of the water until a passing ripple pulled her under and she vanished.

Here, I was an impartial party—an observer. But perhaps even more than that, I was the one under observation.

That’s the thing about nature: she’s completely objective. She doesn’t care about your social standing, or whether you’re succeeding at work. She doesn’t care how long you’ve been here, or how much longer you’ll stay. She doesn’t care how needed you are—or whether you’re needed at all.

She simply exists, permeating everything, setting the stage for the play we imagine ourselves to be starring in. She has always been here, and she will continue long after we are gone.

That might sound morbid to some. But in those days, it was an anchor. It made my fears, my sorrows, my anxieties feel small. Like my troubles were nothing more than spiderwebs stretched briefly across the path of my life.

I’ve since moved away from that place, and I look back on those quiet hours at the creek with a bittersweet fondness. Sometimes it feels like I have unfinished business there. I even feel a flicker of jealousy when I think about it—that Buffalo Creek still trickles steadily along, hosting its endless procession of brief and passing lives, while I am far away and absent from it entirely.

She has a piece of me now, that’s for sure.

And with this painting, I suppose I’ve kept a small piece of her, too.