Creek Walk (I)

My Abstract

“Creek Walk” is a series of writing where I will explore the creek near my house, the flora and fauna it is a habitat for, and its history before and after the reckless expansion of the city of Winnipeg. 

Omands Creek where it meets the Assiniboine River. The deposits of clay in the foreground are the remnants of a beaver dam.

There is a creek near my house in the West End of Winnipeg. It is one of my happy places. It flows southward into the Assiniboine River, which flows eastward into the Red River at the historic Forks in downtown Winnipeg, which flows northward into Lake Winnipeg, which drains much further north into the Nelson River, which flows into Hudson Bay. 

This creek has a story to tell. It’s a story about us. 

The creek is called Omands Creek, after a settler who farmed the land where the creek meets the Assiniboine River. Before this it was called Catfish Creek, and was much shorter. There used to be another creek called Colony Creek with headwaters to the northwest of the city that branched into several marshy tributaries that carried water roughly southeast into the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in what is now central Winnipeg. 

When the city recklessly expanded during the last half of the 19th century, all these tributaries of Colony Creek were filled in and Colony Creek was rerouted south to join Catfish Creek, which at this point was renamed Omands Creek. 

Walking north along Omands Creek today, you can plainly see where the old Catfish Creek and the rerouted Colony Creek meet. The Catfish Creek portion meanders as you would expect a natural creek to do. But by the time the creek runs alongside Empress Street, the meandering creek becomes a straight ditch that stretches north then west, where it meets the old Colony Creek. 

But whether it flows in a human-made ditch or in a naturally meandering creek, water is life. 

Omands Creek is surrounded by big-box stores and filled with shopping carts and garbage, but it is a refuge for all kinds of wildlife. Trees, shrubs, grasses, marsh plants, grouse, red-winged black birds, kingfishers, yellow warblers, song sparrows, beavers, muskrats, skunks, deer, hares, fish, frogs, turtles, snakes, insects, ground squirrels: this is a short list of the species I have seen with my own eyes along a short span of this urban creek.

In the winter, my family walks on the frozen creek, whacking each other with the tips of cattails, sending seed-fluff flying everywhere. In the summer, we walk along the creek with our dog George. A walk amongst the creek plants after a summer rain is truly a breath of medicine. 

Lady’s Slipper, an elusive orchid, spotted on a recent creek walk. 

Indeed, water is life. But it can also be death for dumb humans that build a city on a flat clay floodplain and fill in all the creeks and marshes and coulees and other natural reservoirs so that their big dumb city can grow. Where is all that water going to go?

It can also be death for dumb humans that build their city hall on top of one of the filled-in tributaries of the old Colony Creek. The building almost immediately started to sink into the soft former creek bed. It lasted seven years before being demolished. 

Winnipeg’s first city hall, built in 1876, sank into the soft soil where Brown’s Creek was filled in. They tried to save it in 1883 by pushing on it with big sticks, as seen here. Surprisingly, that did not work. The building was demolished later that year.

The stupidity of our society is on full display here. The powers that be fight so hard against the nature of things. Is this a product of the Industrial Revolution? Or colonialism? This idea that the earth must be conquered so that humans can thrive? All the resources and time spent and the energy exerted to reroute something as timeless and powerful as the flow of water boggles the mind.

In Winnipeg, they keep building ditches and retention ponds and storm sewers to try and do the job that the old marshes and coulees and creeks used to do very well on their own. The city even built a MASSIVE ditch in the 1960s called the Red River Floodway to divert floodwaters from the Red River. At the time, it was the second largest land-moving project ever undertaken by human beings. Only the Panama Canal was bigger. 

But it’s a fight that just can’t be won. Water is going to flow in ways you did not predict—this is a flat clay floodplain, remember? Over the years there have been some devastating floods here. When I was in Grade 12, Winnipeg experienced the “Flood of the Century.” I, along with thousands of other apathetic high school students, were bussed out to the river-adjacent neighbourhoods to sandbag. I’m still waiting for my “Thank You” card from the neighbourhood I helped save.

(Actually, I cannot lie about this anymore. I didn’t lift a single sandbag. I snuck off and smoked butts all day long. But you’re welcome anyway?)

Winnipeg under water in 1997.

Hero. (Me, circa 1997.)

I learned most of this information from a guy named Robert Graham, who wrote a dissertation about the surface waters of Winnipeg in 1984. It’s a really good read, and can be summed up with this entertaining quote: “With regard to land drainage, it is hard to imagine, among the great cities of Canada, a poorer physical site for a large urban centre than that of Winnipeg.”¹

My abstract: Winnipeg is an actual shithole. 

Listening

“In a World Possessed By The Human Mind,” The Tragically Hip

During Winnipeg’s “Flood of the Century,” I was a “punk” and wasn’t supposed to like certain things. I definitely wasn’t supposed to like The Tragically Hip, one of Canada’s biggest rock bands. But secretly, I did like them. The energy I wasted ignoring my own interests and proclivities so that I could “be a punk” is on par with that exerted by the ditch- and retention-pond-diggers.

I am no longer confined to the ditch of my own digging. My life now meanders like old Catfish Creek, and I’m going to like what I’m going to like. And I like The Tragically Hip.

I don’t know what this particular song is about, but its title seems fitting for this week’s dispatch.

1. https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/items/f5c919dd-25e1-41ff-9587-db7c0a2bd2be