Spring Is Here
Sarah Hasselquist
Posted May 1, 2006
If you went down to Chester Creek a month ago, you would have found the walking paths to be muddy and, for the most part, abandoned. But it is a different story now that Duluth has seen warm weather again.
A man and a young boy lay outstretched in the sun on a boulder next to the creek. A young couple runs down the hill with smiles on their faces. A woman and young boy carefully climb over exposed tree roots and rocks to avoid a mud puddle. Two college aged young men haul bikes up the path past the woman and young boy to go biking again on the more level ground.
Spring is here, turning the brown grass green, filling out the barren trees and pouring water into the creeks of Duluth, as well as bringing out the residents of Duluth and their families to explore Chester Creek.
Upstream and on trails where the rushing water of the creek is barely audible, Tony Dierckins is taking a walk on a Friday afternoon. Dierckins, who used to teach in the composition department at UMD, is out with his three dogs, Stella, Gilda, and Max. These dogs are full grown, waist-high masses of energy. Dierckins sports a blue long sleeved shirt, green-khaki cargo pants and an about three day old salt-and-pepper beard.
Dierckins yells to his dogs and leads them out of a part of the woods where the stench of an animal’s decaying carcass had attracted all three of them.
“They’re only fun until they’re disgusting,� Dierckins says about his dogs as he trudges out of the brush.
A life-long dog owner, Dierckins says he comes to Chester everyday, even in the winter.
“On days when there’s more time, we get in the car and go to Lester, Hartley, or the beach,� Dierckins says. “Sometimes even Bagley.�
Just down the trail, Scott Sveiven trots by in baggy gray shorts and a matching tank top with the tiny earbuds in his ears plugged into an iPod. Sveiven, a UMD biology student, is out for a run.
“I started this autumn and kept it up to November. Then it got kind of snowy and I moved inside to work out,� Sveiven says.
Further downstream, where the trail gets closer to the creek and the sound of rushing water raises to a dull roar, three students in elementary and middle school are crossing the creek. The oldest is a boy carrying a walking stick taller than himself with a black plastic woven cord wrapped around the top of the stick. The next in age and height is a girl; the top half of her walking stick is half covered in duct tape. The youngest and last to cross the creek is a boy, his stick undecorated. They all make it across without falling in, stepping on slick rocks precariously and holding their walking sticks out in front of them as the water rushes past. Reaching the shore, they plant their walking sticks on solid ground.
On a quieter section of the trail downstream of the crossing point of the young students, Daryl Beede and his wife, Sarah, step lightly around a mud puddle that spans the width of the walking path. Sarah, who has long black hair with touches of gray in it, pauses for a moment in their relaxed stroll along the trail to look at the scenery around them. Daryl, a tall middle-aged man with large, thick glasses, follows suit and watches the quietly but quickly flowing water just 15 feet away from him.
“I have Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays off, so I can get out in the woods,� Daryl says with a glance at the creek, then his wife, and then woods around him.
Across a footbridge and down the creek from this couple, two freshmen at UMD, Jon McLaughlin and David Souther are not so much interested in the woods as the rock walls, the creek, and the trails.
Souther and McLaughlin are standing just next to the creek when Souther carefully packs his fishing pole into his backpack and follows McLaughlin up a rocky wall from the edge of the creek. When the reach the trail, they resume their hiking. Souther’s fishing pole is still poking out of the top of his backpack.
Souther says that he has never caught anything in Chester Creek.
“I just try,� he says with a chuckle. “No fish in this river.�
A couple hundred feet away, Lynn Larson stands next to her tripod below the Fourth Street bridge with her dog’s taut leash in one hand and her camera in the other.
Larson is getting ready for a freelance group photography trip to photograph Appalachian spring flowers. For now, she is taking pictures of Chester Creek, other hiking areas, and the lighthouses in Duluth.
Although she lives outside of Chicago, she drove up for the weekend to visit her son in Duluth as well as her dog. Bear, her dog, is a large yellow lab that is living with her son in Duluth while she is selling her house.
“We named him Paddington Bear because he’s so yellow, but the kids all thought that was sissy, so he’s always been called Bear,� Larson says.
Bear continues sniffing everything in reach of his leash which is now tied to a tree. Larson tweaks the adjustments of her camera on the tripod, meticulously aiming the lens at the water of Chester Creek as it races over the rocks, past the trees, and plunges downward to flow beneath Fourth Street and eventually out to Lake Superior.
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