I was never one to be big on the whole nature thing. I’m still not a fan of it. In fact, nature is kinda gross and weird and freaks me out. Even though this is the case, I’d still prefer being outside than doing book work inside and having to suffer through a choir class that only consists of yelling at the altos. So, in my case, I hauled myself outside for a day at Fox Run.
Okay, so it was more like six hours at Fox Run and a two hour power walk around Dover, PA, but I’m gonna skip that part. I would rather not have war flashbacks. Our class arrived at the park around ten and I was amazed. Of course, I had seen the stream before, but to be up close and personal with the barely moving body of water blew me away. No, really, I was practically blown away by how windy it was at the beginning of the day. Getting over my hatred of wind and everything in general, I learned that day that Fox Run is a first order stream, and when it meets another first order stream, the two would go together to create the Little Conewago Creek. And then when another second order stream such as the Little Conewago Creek combined with the Little Conewago Creek, it would create a third order stream such as the Conewago Creek. And so on and so on. Totally out of context, but I learned just now that Fox Run is part of the Conewago Creek watershed. The Conewago Creek would eventually drain into the Susquehanna River, then that drains into the Chesapeake Bay, and then into the Atlantic Ocean. Stream order used to be a whole lot of nothing to me. It still is, but now I have the knowledge to pass Ecology class.
While taking a nice, little ten minute nap in the grass, I over heard my partners not only complaining about me doing nothing, but also discussing the sub-basins and basins. Miki was talking about the basins being the Ohio River Basin, the Delaware River Basin, the Genesee River Basin, the Potomac River Basin, the Lake Erie Basin, and the Susquehanna River Basin. I already knew this because I actually paid attention for once and learned something. Kathryn was going over the sub-basins, yet Emma quickly stopped her, saying she wanted to do it. Since I got annoyed by Emma’s voice, I turned on my music and blocked her out. Fortunately, I knew that the sub-basins were the Chemung River Sub-Basin, the Juniata River Sub-Basin, and the Upper, Middle, Lower, and West Branch Susquehanna Sub-Basins.
When I finally gave up on trying to nap because of the strange, mid-twenty year old man staring at me while he “fished”, I kinda just looked at the stream. Not only due to the fact that I was tired, lazy, and didn’t wanna work, but because it kinda looked pleasant. The stream was grassy, to say the least. It was freakin’ grassy. The stream wasn’t level and the banks sure weren’t level, the ground being different heights around each other. The bed of the stream was visible from the surface until Emma started dropping rocks into the water. There was a good amount of silt and gravel covering the bed of the stream, and on the banks near the bridge, not the road bridge, but the park bridge, there was a bunch of cobble. Close to the road bridge and the creepy man, there was a pipe sticking out of the ground, pointed towards the stream. It didn’t look like it did much, but it had a purpose.
The day quickly came to a close and the class headed back inside. While I was brushing my hair in the bathroom after just learning I got a callback for the school play, I realized I sort of had a good time outside that day. It was actually a ton of fun.