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Our Water: Raindrop Experiences the January Thawby Lois B. Robbins Wheee! Here we go! The January thaw is upon us, and now we raindrops, well, snowflakes (until yesterday when the weather warmed up), who have been locked up in this snow drift for weeks, get to go rushing off to our next adventure. But wait! Nothing’s happening! We’re just slowly sinking in right here, where the wind pushed us up in December. This is even better! This is definitely my favorite thing, - just sinking into the ground where we landed. We get to do that here because this time we fell in a field where the land is protected from development. That means there will never be hard rooftops here. And no blacktop driveways and no lawns where the soil has been compacted and the grass has such short roots that they’re of little use for picking up pollutants or slowing us down as we rush downhill toward the creek. Instead, what we find in a protected place like this is soil that still has some sponginess; and grasses that have been allowed to develop some deep roots. Best of all are the native plants here, - the New Jersey Tea, New England Asters, Coneflowers, Black-eyed Susans and Prairie Dock. You can’t see much of them above ground at this time of the year, but there’s a lot going on below. Their roots go really deep. They know how to live in this place. After all, their ancestors were here for millennia before Europeans ever set foot on this continent. They’ve had time to develop some great defenses against disease, and they’ve figured out how to enlist the help of local wildlife in distributing their seeds. Under the ground, their roots have laced together to create a web that helps to hold onto us raindrops when we sink in. They drink us and many of them can hold onto any pollutants we might have picked up, so that they don’t end up in the creek or the lake. That’s the beauty of landing in a place like this. There are so many natural processes that welcome us and clean us up, so that by the time most of us get to the creek, or sink into the aquifer, we’re jjust about as pure as when we first hit the ground. We’re fit to drink, or play in. We won’t hurt anybody. So, as I take a deep breath and sink peacefully into the soft earth, my heart fills with gratitude for the people in the North Oakland Headwaters Land Conservancy who hold this land in a conservation easement, by agreement with the land’s owner. The easement agreement states that this land will never be developed, and the conservancy people will steward it forever. Who would have guessed that protecting land could have such an important effect on the quality of the water humans depend on for their health, their recreation, and their quality of life?
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