WINCHESTER — The old Taylor place, just west of Winchester in the farm fields of Drew County, features an abundance of quiet. It also features an abundance of snakes, which is why Curtis Merrell wants everyone in the small party of explorers and city folk to have a stout walking stick.
Snakes aren’t the only wildlife. Looks like bees have a hive on the second floor of this timbered, two-story house near the banks of Bayou Bartholomew. The stairs are creaky, but the adventurous take them up for a look around. Bird droppings are deep and pungent. Vines climb and overwhelm this old pioneer place.
How old? It dates to circa 1844, built with what Merrell said may be cypress logs. They are huge, cut square.
Nearby is an old cemetery, weeds at eye level. Some graves are of slaves, Merrell said. Not that blacks or whites were here first. There are Indian mounds around, too.
Merrell would like to save all of this history.
But foremost, the bayou.
“It’s a national treasure,” Merrell said, “but nobody knows about it.”
Steve Filipek of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission agrees with the treasure part.
“No doubt,” Filipek, assistant chief of programs in the fisheries division, said. “Because it has water, fish and wildlife right there, in an area with a lot of agriculture. We can have both of those together.”
Bayou Bartholomew compares favorably “with our world-renowned Buffalo River,” Filipek said. In fact, it has more species of fish than the Buffalo - 115 vs. 70. They include uncommon fish such as bluehead shiners, taillight shiners and the gold stripe topminnow, he said.
Merrell calls Bayou Bartholomew “a muddy old Southern stream” that begins its long meander around Pine Bluff and drifts down into Louisiana, where it meets up with the Ouachita River. In Arkansas, it runs through Jefferson, Lincoln, Drew and Ashley counties.
How long? About 350 miles. How meandering? From Pine Bluff straight to the Louisiana line is about 85 miles. The bayou has so many twists and turns that it lays claim to being the longest bayou - a marshy, sluggish tributary to a river or lake - in the world.
Sluggish isn’t the right word on this day in early November. It’s moving fast. Merrell’s party walked over a nearby wooden bridge. The water is inches from the bridge and flowing fast. One of Merrell’s dreams is that the bayou be navigable for small boats throughout its length. When a member of the group wondered out loud how that could be, what with the water up to the bridge, Merrell explained that normally the bayou is 10-12 feet under the bridge.
Cypress trees crowd out the sky. Oaks loom. Willows weep. That’s one way to keep track of the bayou as it winds through the fields of white cotton. Follow the tree line, turning now from summer green to autumn rust.
The day is warm and sunny. Life teems. Clusters of minnows dart through the water. Frogs jump. Dark toads hide in the grass. Ladybugs are everywhere.
A seriously large alligator was taken out of Trotter Lake, an oxbow of Bayou Bartholomew, back in 2007 - nearly 13 feet long. Regrettably, there are no whopper gators lurking around on this day, but there are plenty of turtles.
Other things - people things - also come out of the bayou. So many things that Field & Stream magazine recently commended Merrell as a hero of conservation. He and members of the Bayou Bartholomew Alliance have, over the past 14 years, dragged about 170 tons of trash from the bayou, the magazine said.
More about that shortly. First, origins.
Merrell is a retired public school administrator. For about15 years he was director of an educational cooperative based in Pine Bluff. He lived then, and still does, in Monticello. Every workday he and some other folks drove the 50 or so miles to work. And back, crossing over Bayou Bartholomew literally thousands of times.
It was trashy.
“Isn’t that a shame,” he recalled in an interview at his home. “All that trash out there, and the logjams. Somebody ought to do something about that.”
That somebody turned out to be the alliance, a group of like-minded people from south Arkansas gathered up by Merrell in 1995. The goal, Merrell said, was to restore the bayou, to make it clear and clean the way it once was.
The cleanups started that year at Yorktown, in Lincoln County, and in Pine Bluff.
In Pine Bluff, the Jefferson County judge loaned the alliance a couple of Dumpsters, a backhoe and a dump truck. There was also a truck with a winch.
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” Merrell said.
What Merrell and other members of the alliance got out of Bayou Bartholomew that day, and in the many subsequent cleanups, was ... gross.
Couches. Toilets. Water heaters.
Volunteers would go out in a boat and grab something. “We’d wrassle it up into the boat or alongside,” Merrell said.
At one cleanup in Pinebergen, in Jefferson County, the group spent seven hours hauling out junk, including a refrigerator. Plus several newspaper boxes, a big steel safe with the bottom cut out and deer carcasses with the antlers cut off.
Things are better now, Merrell said. Counties have environmental officers. In Desha County recently, trash in the bayou was traced to five families. Merrell said they were given the option of paying a fine or cleaning it up.
The alliance did two or three cleanups a year, but hasn’t done one in a couple of years, Merrell said. The next cleanup, and trail development projects, are currently planned for the spring. Details to be worked out, Merrell said.
Filipek has been on some of those cleanups. “Everything you’d see in a landfill, we’ve seen in that bayou.”
One cleanup involved more than 100 people and covered three counties. “Everybody has a good time because they feel like they’re making a difference.”
The alliance and Filipek go back to 1996, when Game and Fish started the Arkansas Stream Team program. The alliance was the first stream team of the dozen that formed that year. The program had been wildly successful in Missouri, where Filipek estimates there are more than 3,000 stream teams. Arkansas has about 750stream teams now, he said, in every county in the state.
Teams clean up streams and fix riverbanks to stop erosion. They also plant trees and shrubs. Filipek estimates that the Bayou Bartholomew Alliance has planted more than a million trees and shrubs along the bayou, from grasses with long roots to willows, oaks and fragrant sumac.
Merrell said there are cypress trees on Bayou Bartholomew that may be 1,000 years old.
Can this be?
“I would not be at all surprised,” said David Stahle, a distinguished professor in the geosciences department at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
East Arkansas has cypress trees hundreds of years old, he said, including those north and south of Interstate 40 in the Dagmar Wildlife Management Area. Many old trees “have been pillaged by man,” he said, but the really old trees may be hollow and simply too decrepit to be worth harvesting.
“If we were to canoe Bayou Bartholomew,” Stahle said, “we would find amazing ancient forest remnants,” including taxodium distichum - Southern swamp cypress.
“I completely agree with the notion that Bayou Bartholomew is a state and national treasure,” Stahle said, “and we should do everything possible to preserveits natural integrity.”
What sets Merrell and the alliance apart, Filipek said, is that its members include landowners.
“Curtis keeps pushing for the bayou to be better managed. He works with landowners, mayors and county judges. He tends to want to be collaborative rather than oppositional.”
There are about 1,000 people on the alliance’s mailing list who get a periodic newsletter, Merrell said. He added: “Anybody who comes out and works for an hour picking up trash is a member of our alliance.”
Merrell is 74. He sorely misses his wife, Virginia - “Ginny” - who died in November 2008. “She loved helping other people,” he said. They had been married 54 years.
In Pine Bluff, right off Interstate 540, the bayou runs behind a big Wal-Mart. Right near a strip mall is the Curtis Merrell Access to the bayou, so designated by the Game and Fish Commission.
A nice tribute, but restoring Bayou Bartholomew will go on for a long time, Merrell said.
“Someone will have to monitor it forever.”
Style, Pages 29 on 12/15/2009