The ledger is a Boorum & Pease columnar book, 12 columns, bought used for four dollars at a shop on Burnet Road in March 2019. Left page holds date, my staff reading at the low-water crossing below the Loop 360 bridge, and rainfall from the wedge gauge in my side yard. Right page is blank ruled space for whatever I noticed. Ink is Noodler's black because it survives a wet thumb.
My gauge is not official. It is a length of white PVC with electrical tape at every two inches, zip-tied to the third piling from the north bank, and I read it standing in the same spot with the same slouch. The zero is arbitrary. What matters is that it has been arbitrary in exactly the same way for six years.
September 2, 2023 reads: 0.0, no flow at crossing, three pools upstream holding. That was the summer the creek went to pools and stayed there for eleven weeks. I walked the reach from the crossing up to the bend below the bluff and wrote down each pool with a letter. Pool C was the deep one, about waist high at the boulder, and it had perch in it the entire dry stretch. Pool E went to mud on July 30 and smelled like it for a month.
An app gives me a number every fifteen minutes and no memory. It cannot tell me that the water was clear on May 6, 2022 and the color of weak tea two days later, or that the difference was a burn scar upstream shedding ash after a half inch of rain. It cannot tell me the cypress on the east bank lost its lower branch sometime between February and April 2021, probably in the freeze, and that the branch is still wedged in the shallows and now collects a gravel bar behind it every time the creek runs.
Rainfall entries stack up strange. 2021 gave me 41.2 inches at my yard gauge and the creek was pleasant most of the year. 2022 gave me 22.8 and the crossing was dry from June 11 through the end of October. Then 2024 came in at 33.5 and still went dry in August, which tells me the timing of an inch matters more than the inch.
My mistakes stay in the book. On March 14, 2020 I wrote 8.0 and it should have been 3.0. I struck it once and wrote the correction beside it rather than scrubbing the page, because a struck line is information too and I do not trust a record that has never been wrong.
Current entry, September 1, 2026: 1.5, thin flow over the limestone shelf, water cool at the ankle, one heron working the tail of Pool C. Rain gauge holds 0.35 from the Thursday storm. The book has eighty-one pages left, which at my rate is roughly through 2032.