'Waller Creek is a test case': Anti-litter UT students help keep waterway free from debris

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4 days ago

Not long ago, Rachel Elsberry, a reliable sharer of stimulating news, told us about Longhorns Don't Litter, a student group dedicated to making and keeping the University of Texas campus beautiful.
In particular, Elsberry, who works alongside Amber Matula, a UT Austin communications student, introduced me to Creeky the Creek Monster, the new mascot that the campus anti-litter group has adopted.
Emerald green and spotted, Creeky arrives as an upright furry — part plant-y? — with a Bevo-like head and blue-splashed paws. Presumably, it emerged from Waller Creek, which bisects the campus in a generally north-south direction. (I'm imagining a public-service video of the monster terrorizing a serial litterer in the style of "The Legend of Boggy Creek.")
The creek's shorter fork emerges at the Texas State Hospital, and, after an underground stretch, winds through elegant Hemphill Park before joining the creek's longer branch near Dean Keaton Street, named for legendary UT Law School Dean, W. Page Keeton, father to the recently deceased former Austin Mayor .
The main fork of Waller Creek, named after city founder and plantation owner Edwin Waller, rises from a modest source in the Highland neighborhood not far from Austin Community College's main campus, and meanders through the Hyde Park and Hancock hoods before tumbling into UT along San Jacinto Street.
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These mingled branches exit UT near the Dell Medical School complex, after which the creek becomes the responsibility of the , a public-private partnership that has already built and manages the Moody Amphitheater in Waterloo Park, and is putting the finishing touches on improvements at the creek's mouth on Lady Bird Lake. (Recently, , former president of Huston-Tillotson University, was appointed to lead the conservancy.)
In a sense, Longhorns Don't Litter and the Waterloo Conservancy share stewardship of about two thirds of the creek's run. Along with the city of Austin's diversionary , regularly cleaned by city workers, they help this natural jewel stay free from the mountains of detritus that wash down from the upstream streets, sidewalks and parking lots into the creek's watershed. Their efforts put a dent in the trash from all over the city that lies within the river's watershed and ends up in after every major rainstorm.
When laid out by Waller and his team of surveyors in 1839, the city was embraced on three sides by water — Waller Creek to the east, Shoal Creek to the west, and the Colorado River to the south.
Therefore, Waller Creek appears in the Statesman archives many thousands of times, including during April 1915, when a devastating flood swept down Waller and Shoal creeks. The homes and businesses of the city's more underprivileged citizens stood in the flood zones; the needy lost more lives and property than those high on the hills. The debris from the two watersheds collided in the Colorado River.
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As my digital chat with Elsberry and her colleagues, including Professor Valerie Salinas-Davis, former owner of Enviromedia, developed, the subject of deceased English Professor Joseph Jones inevitably arose. Jones visited the creek almost every day. He lunched on its banks and he collected what he found along its waterway.
In 1982, Jones wrote a book, "Life on Waller Creek," that is filled with his notes, some inspiring, other mundane. In 2015, when the Waterloo Conservancy was in its infancy, a benefactor, Walter Wilkie, thought about republishing Jones's out-of-print work, but decided instead to publish "Austin's Waller Creek: Promise for Tomorrow" which conveys the geography, hydrology, history and other aspects about the creek and the tunnel meant to free up the flood plain for sensitive parks and developments.
"Why a big runoff tunnel?" the Statesman story asks. "The book's historical sections make it clear: Waller Creek flooded badly in 1836, 1843, 1852, 1866, 1869, 1900, 1909, 1915, 1935, 1936 and 1981. Two of the worst, 1869 and 1915, were particularly destructive."
To inspire the Longhorns Don't Litter heroes, it seems right to share an excerpt from the 2012 Statesman story and its description of Jones' 1982 book:
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His story starts, rightly, with geology. He recounts Austin's founding on the lower creek in 1839, its Gilded Age in the late 19th century, also its modern evolution in the 20th century.
Three chapters deal directly with university history, which returns predictably to Texas governors or their agents trying to dictate campus life. Jones fleshes out the catalytic 1969 protests against Frank Erwin, when the imperial UT regent pushed to demolish old oaks along the creek to make way for a stadium expansion.
A good deal of the book is given over to songlike poems and inventories of ephemera fished out of the creek bed. Today's reader might be more drawn to the chapter titled "Drainage Ditch or Garden Park?" It should astonish some Austinites to discover that leaders periodically suggested turning Waller Creek into a concrete canal, especially after bad floods.
And yet, that's close to what happened to the uppermost stretches of the creek. Jones opposed such efforts and his words would hearten the backers of the current Conservancy.
"Waller Creek is a test case," he writes, "tested now through almost 150 years of use and abuse. It is both a broad symbol and a tangible opportunity to move towards a new promise by redeeming an old promise — the one made by nature herself in 1839, which in far too many ways, we have prevented her from keeping."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: UT students deploy 'Creeky the Creek Monster' in anti-litter campaign