Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcast is a biweekly series featuring Catskills culture, history, sustainability, local interviews, literature, and the arts. Shows are hosted by Brett Barry and produced by Silver Hollow Audio, in the heart of the Catskills. Subscribe and experience what reviewers have called “delightfully informative” storytelling with “great production quality.” Voted “Best Regional Podcast” three years in a row. Episode archives, transcripts, and a robust search engine at kaatscast.com. Enjoy!
[00:00:00] Brett Barry: In 1987, a 24-year-old geology student moved here from Alaska with his partner, four kids, a dog, and two cats. Dany Davis is retiring this month from his post as stream studies coordinator for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and for almost three decades, Dany has been waiting, surveying, and studying Catskill streams, becoming one of the foremost experts on these waterways and finding somewhere along the way that the streams gave back far more than data. I'm Brett Barry, and this is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast." Dany joined me on a bank of the Warner Creek, a tributary of the Stony Clove [that one leads to the Esopus], and then onto the Ashokan Reservoir, the heart of New York City's water supply.
[00:01:02] Dany Davis: Okay, well, I'll start with the easiest one. Who am I? I'm Dany Davis. I'm a geologist, and I work for the New York City DEP's stream management program, and I have been doing this for about 30 years. It'll be 30 years in December, and where we are at the moment is in Silver Hollow, sitting along the bank next to a friend of mine, Warner Creek, that I've been getting to know since 2009.
[00:01:33] Brett Barry: You're not from here. You came from pretty much the opposite side of this country, as far opposite as you can get.
[00:01:41] Dany Davis: Yeah, I was born in Alaska in 1963, a year before the 1964 earthquake, because my mom would always tell me the stories about that, so we were living there during the, at the time, one of the world's biggest earthquakes, and I moved when I was a kid down into the lower 48 into East Tennessee, the Smoky Mountains area, and Florida and ended up graduating high school there, and when I was 18, I hitchhiked back to Alaska from Tennessee to go to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and that was in 1980-81, and I lived there until I moved here in 1987 with four kids, a dog, two cats, and a really excellent partner.
[00:02:24] Brett Barry: What brought you here?
[00:02:25] Dany Davis: My partner. [LAUGHTER] Terry and I—we weren't married at the time. We got married later. She and I were living in a one-room cabin outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, without running water. We did have electricity in that cabin. We had just had a baby, my daughter Fiona, who's now 40, and we had four kids in this one-room cabin, and Terry's parents lived in Northern New Jersey, and her dad was starting a new business, and he offered her an opportunity to work in it, so we ended up accepting that offer and moving down to Northern New Jersey to live with her parents. We figured we had about a hundred-mile radius because she had to kind of be at that location sometimes, and the furthest north we could get was New Paltz, and there was a university there, SUNY New Paltz, so I finished my degree at SUNY New Paltz, so it was really SUNY New Paltz that helped us land in the Kerhonkson area, so between the Catskills and the Gunks.
[00:03:28] Brett Barry: So I know that in these parts, you are the stream expert. Can you tell me a little... I mean, we see you all the time because you're constantly studying, researching, and journaling about these creeks, right? And it's all part of your work.
[00:03:43] Dany Davis: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:43] Brett Barry: So can you tell me a little bit about that career path and where it's landed?
[00:03:49] Dany Davis: Yeah, I can, but I would like to just first say that I don't really like to be considered a stream expert, right? So I'm a student of streams, and I have a lot of curiosity, and streams just keep me busy, so I've learned a lot, but I think expertise is one. It's a word that I'm not as comfortable with.
[00:04:09] Brett Barry: What about modesty?
[00:04:12] Dany Davis: But so I ended up getting the privilege of getting paid to wade streams and ask questions and listen for answers and look for answers. In late 1996, I started working for New York City DEP. Before that, I was a groundwater geologist, so my entire career has been about water, and water is actually what pulled me into studying geology because I had been spending a lot of time on glaciers in Alaska and some mountaineering. I went from studying ice to modeling groundwater to actually studying streams. I had no background in streams before I started studying this. It was all related to groundwater conditions. About seven years into my career as a groundwater flow modeler, I had bid on a project for New York City DEP to develop a groundwater flow model in Fleischmanns, New York, where they were proposing to put a wastewater treatment plant. New York City rules and regs required that any new municipal plant had to investigate whether they could take their treated effluent, that's the wastewater, and put it in the ground rather than discharge it directly into a creek, and so the ground idea is that it would get additional filtration, so I was a consultant, I bid on the job, I got it, it was successful, and about eight months later, I was working for the city running that program for seven other communities, and when I got that completed by about 1999, the stream management program needed a geologist, and I needed to plug into something, and so I was able to [by the year 2000] start working full-time as the geologist and then learn to be what's called the fluvial geomorphologist, and fluvial is just a fancy word for stream, and geomorphology is the study of the earth's surface forms and the processes that make those forms so that's what I had to learn, and I'm still learning. I'm pretty good at it, but I'm not an expert.
[00:06:09] Brett Barry: Expert enough to tell me a little bit about the geologic history of the Catskills. Can we go way back, and what can you tell us about that history and how the streams are intertwined in that?
[00:06:24] Dany Davis: Yeah, it's a beautiful story, and it's really what's kept me, I think, in a learning mode. It's hard to always pick the origin story of something because you can keep going back and back and back, but let's just—if we—we're going to focus on the Catskills, and the bedrock of the Catskills is what gives us all of the sediment that you're seeing in the stream that we're sitting next to right now. All of that sediment, the cobbles, the boulders, the sand, the gravel, and even some of the silts and clays that are in there—almost all of that originates from the bedrock that the mountains were composed of, so it's been eroded in place, but what's fascinating about the rocks here is that if I pick up or look at one of these boulders, the sandstone boulder, that sand was actually river sand that was deposited in rivers that were in place 380 to 385 million years ago. It's called the middle-to-late Devonian period, and it was a fascinating time in Earth's history because this is when forests started to actually grow. You know, if you go back, say, 50 million or 100 million years before that, there might have been some very primitive plants, but there wasn't really any kind of forest community, but we have the record of the first forests in the middle to late Devonian in the Catskills in the Cairo area. We're living in the area where we have the best record of these really early forests, and what's particularly cool about that is our record is actually recorded not only in the floodplain forests at that time, where you can see the root traces and you can find fallen trees, but we actually see it in the river sediment too because these were meandering rivers that were cutting into the banks of these forests. Those trees would fall in the stream just like they do today, and then that wood would break into fragments just like it does today. A flood would happen, that wood would get buried, then another wooden would happen, and eventually that wood gets buried so deep that it can't really decompose, and you end up with fossil wood, and so often when I'm out in the stream, I pick up a boulder. I'm picking up the memory of an ancient stream. Let's go back 20,000 years ago—so not that long ago. Geologically, where we're sitting right now, we would be under a few thousand feet of glacial ice, and that glacial ice was moving south from Canada down towards Long Island, and so we would not only be under ice, but this ice would be flowing, probably smearing us and placing us in a thick package of sediment that we call glacial till, and that till, as you can imagine, if it's under thousands of feet of ice and that ice is flowing, it's got this traction so it just lodges that sediment into place, and we call that lodgement till, so most of the Catskill valleys where you don't see bedrock, what you're seeing are the glacial legacy deposits. A lot of it is the glacial till deposited directly by the ice. Most of the material that's in that is boulders to clay-sized particles. All of that comes from those Devonian river deposits, so we get Devonian river deposits that become Pleistocene ice age glacial deposits, and then after that ice started to melt back, that meltwater got trapped and created these vast glacial lakes that filled a lot of the Catskill valleys, especially in the Esopus Valley and in the Schoharie Valley, and they were in place for tens of years, hundreds of years, or a thousand years. It varied because it was a very messy process, but that left behind a legacy of layer upon layer upon layer of silt and clay and some sand and silt and clay and some sand, and that represents each year, so you can actually look at how old a lake may be or, not how old, but how many years a lake was in place by looking at the different layers. It's kind of like a tree ring. It's like dendrochronology: looking at the age of the tree, we can—we're looking at the rings in the tree. We can determine its age. We're looking at the number of repeating layers of sediment in these glacial lakes. We can see that some of these were hundreds of years old. The ice retreated, the streams returned, and the streams were here before the ice was here, and they came back, and now they've started resorting all that glacial legacy sediment, and so we're back to rivers, so we went from these Devonian rivers to these Pleistocene glaciers, and now we're in the modern-day river time, and so it's just, for me as a geologist, beautiful to see these linked stories, and it's water that's linking each of those histories.
[00:11:08] Brett Barry: Am I correct that the mountains, the Catskill Mountains, first of all, are mountains?
[00:11:13] Dany Davis: Yes, I did write an article on this called "Are the Catskills Truly Mountains?" Yes, the Catskills are mountains because for me and for most geomorphologists, a mountain is a land form, right? It isn't how it was made. It is... do you have a peak? Do you have surrounding slopes? Is that elevated terrain separated from other elevated terrain, and do you get mountain forms and valley forms? If you do, you get mountains. Often mountains are associated with where there has been compression in the earth's crust, and that compressive force uplifts the terrain. It folds it, it faults it, and so you get this elevated terrain, and weathering shapes those mountains. You can also get mountains from volcanoes, or you can get mountains from a variety of structural ways to do it. The Catskills are passive mountains. They weren't formed through this kind of compressive tectonic story. What we think happened is that the earth's crust uplifted, related to plate tectonics, but it went through a much slower uplift, and as it uplifted, the weathering and stream flow ended up starting to etch and sketch its way into that terrain and started to form the valleys and started to form more valleys and more valleys till you get all these isolated peaks, and that's called a fluvially dissected plateau, so it originated as a plateau, but streams and glaciers have taken that plateau and turned it into a mountain range.
[00:12:55] Brett Barry: And so these mountains have been sculpted by streams in a way.
[00:12:58] Dany Davis: Oh, in a big way.
[00:12:59] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:12:59] Dany Davis: In fact, we would not have the Catskills if we didn't have streams, right? So they are really the architects of these. Glaciers have definitely had a significant role, but glaciers have probably only had a role for about the last 2.6 million years, and it wasn't just like one glacial advance. There were multiple glacial advances over that two and a half or so million years. The last one was really only that there wasn't ice here 27,000 years ago, and we were covered in ice 20,000 years ago, and it was gone by fifteen to thirteen thousand years ago. That was a brief engagement, but over that [2.6 million years], it would come in and come out, so a big impact, but streams have had tens of millions of years to do this work, and they're doing it today. Every time we see erosion, every time we see a change in the landscape associated with the stream, that is the stream doing the work of creating the valleys that actually form the mountains, so really we talk about valley evolution in the Catskills as opposed to mountain evolution, so it's a novel way to get our mountains.
[00:14:11] Brett Barry: So I've known this creek for about 35 years.
[00:14:15] Dany Davis: Wow!
[00:14:16] Brett Barry: It never stops running. How's that possible?
[00:14:20] Dany Davis: Yeah, when we look at a river, and I'll use the term "river" a lot, it's independent of size. For me, a river captures maybe the spirit of what I'm talking about more. "River" is not as clinical a term as "stream," so when we're looking at a river, it isn't just that flowing water. The river is not defined by the wetted perimeter. We can look across the river that we're at right now, and we can see all that sediment that's stacked up. It's kind of imbricated in a fish-scale pattern. We can see that was deposited by the stream when the stream was at that stage, and above that, we see an even higher bar that has willows growing on it. That's the memory of another flood, a really big flood that deposited that big gravel bar. Beyond that, we see another higher terrace, and now that's pretty well forested, but you'll notice it's flat, and then if we look over on this side of the stream, we have an even higher terrace. Each of these terraces records a different elevation of the stream through time since the ice age, but beneath the surface is the groundwater, and all of that is draining in and toward this creek, and as the stream flow lowers, it's actually going to potentially draw some more of that, so you get what's called base flow, and really largely what we're looking at right now is the surface expression of a much bigger volume of water that's flowing through this valley. We just don't get to see it because it's covered by the deposits of the stream and by forests.
[00:15:51] Brett Barry: And thousands or millions of years from now, I suspect that this river will be much lower in elevation and that what we're sitting on now will be a higher terrace.
[00:16:01] Dany Davis: Oh, it's a great question because that is if things went in one direction that's true, but what sets the trajectory of a stream to cut down or to build up is something that we'll call "base level." Streams are always flowing to some base level, right? Water flows downslope. Warner Creek is flowing downslope to Stony Clove Creek. Stony Clove sets all of the grade for Warner Creek, right? So whatever happens in Stony Clove has an impact on Warner Creek. If Stony Clove cuts down, as it has been doing, we can see it dramatically today. That oversteepens where Warner Creek comes in, so Warner Creek has to go through an adjustment and starts to lower, and as it lowers, it actually becomes more and more unstable, and it creates more and more erosion. That sediment gets in the stream, and it sets a new grade, so it goes through an evolutionary process to capture that. Well, Stony Clove is lowering a response to whatever's happening on Esopus Creek, and what controls Esopus Creek?
[00:17:08] Brett Barry: The reservoir.
[00:17:09] Dany Davis: Yeah, so we're living in a geologic or a geomorphic timeframe where the entire base level for this whole watershed is being set by the Ashokan Reservoir.
[00:17:21] Brett Barry: A man-made water body.
[00:17:23] Dany Davis: So a thousand years from now, we don't know what's going to be there. A million years from now, we certainly don't know what's going to be there. The ocean level rises, so as the ocean level is rising, the Hudson is going to rise where Esopus comes in. It's going to rise, and you're going to get an almost like a backwater effect, and that's going to actually probably induce some deposition and lower erosion, and we might see that this valley stays at this level for some extended period of time.
[00:17:53] Brett Barry: So you talked about stream stability, and if it weren't for humans, I think that stream stability wouldn't matter. The stream doesn't care, but humans care, and I think that's where a lot of your work comes in, right? So stability, erosion, sediment, and turbidity—can you walk us through some of the research that you've been doing as it relates to water quality and human interaction with this place?
[00:18:20] Dany Davis: Yeah, I mean, I'll first start by saying I work for the New York City water ratepayers, the people who pay the rates for using this water. That's who funds my salary as a DEP scientist.
[00:18:35] Brett Barry: A quick reminder here that much of the water flowing through our Catskill creeks makes its way to New York City, the largest provider of unfiltered drinking water in the nation. To maintain that enviable water quality, the city invests substantially in protecting the Catskill watershed.
[00:18:54] Dany Davis: I run what's called the stream studies program for the stream management program, so my job is less about going in and trying to fix creeks or work out the relationship issues between people who live by creeks and the creeks themselves—it's to actually go out and help bring all the people we need to bring to all the scientists that we can bring to focus on getting the science in front of the management so that when we are working with landowners, we're working with towns. We're working to work out how streams and people can share the same really limited real estate that you get in the Catskills for development and for creeks. We want to understand, in the absence of people or in the presence of people, how do these streams function? How do they respond to floods? How do they respond to management? So a lot of my work is really looking at—can we try to add to our knowledge about how streams behave in the Catskills and what influences that behavior? And from a water quality perspective, my biggest research has been for the last 10 years with USGS on how turbidity is generated in Catskill streams, and turbidity is a fancy word for muddy water. You know, it's about water clarity, and that's an issue for a municipal water supply that gets its water from surface water, and there's federal regulations that require any municipality that has surface water supply needs to meet either filtration requirements or demonstrate that the water doesn't need to be filtered, and the city has been able to operate this unfiltered water supply through a recurring set of programs and rules and regulations that continue to try to protect that. We still have to deal with turbidity. It still gets to the reservoir, and that can be handled through operations and through, you know, flocculation agents and using the release channel to divert some of that water into the Lower Esopus, but we're also charged with trying to stop turbidity at the source to the extent we can, and so my research has been investigating how it is generated and then can we monitor it in such a way and measure it in such a way that wherever we do a practice, a restoration project where we restore stability, can we measure the scale of that impact? You know, is it just a reach scale? Are we only really seeing some improvement in water quality at that location, or are we seeing it at the outlet? Can we see all the projects we've done in the Stony Clove watershed in Warner Creek? Do we see that being measurably effective in Phoenicia at the outlet just before it gets into Esopus? And we can also measure it at Esopus Creek at Coldbrook, which is a USGS gauge that measures all the flow for all of Esopus, so on what scale can we detect the impact of these projects to improve water quality? If there is no impact all the way out to the reservoir scale, what's the point, right? We're able to demonstrate that there is an impact. It depends on the size of the flow event. If you get a really big flood, it's coming from everywhere, so a reach scale type project isn't going to do it, but if it's a smaller flood or, more often the case, you have a big flood, and you may have noticed living here for 30-some years that this used to run really turbid for a long time after a flood. It was brown for weeks, sometimes for months, so if we can shut that down by removing the erosive contact with the source of that turbidity, then we're going to actually be able to reduce the amount of it getting to the reservoir, so a lot of the work is really focused on getting us to be able to have enough knowledge that it can really help guide the spending of millions of dollars on these kinds of restoration projects, and so what matters here is where's the stream in contact with that glacial legacy sediment I mentioned earlier? So the reason we have turbid stream flow in the Catskills is that the streams are doing their job. They are processing and exporting that glacial legacy sediment, the glacial till, and the glacial lake sediment. The glacial till is really hard to erode. It's got a lot of clay in it, but because it was underneath thousands of feet of ice, you know, it's very condensed. The lake sediment, though, is very cohesive, so it's hard to erode it initially, but once you are able to erode it, it's 90-99% clay and silt, so it doesn't take much to do that. So what we do and what I do and why you see me out here all the time with students, mostly for the last 20-some years, is we are mapping the stream to figure out where it is in contact with that, and can we find a pattern so that we can actually maybe predict where we'll see it elsewhere? So a lot of my work is helping understand where turbidity production occurs in the landscape and then helping the people who are then the stream design engineers, the Ashokan Watershed Stream Management Program, with all the money they have from the city to help improve water quality. Where should they go?
[00:24:05] Brett Barry: Is there a particular reason that the Stony Clove and Warner Creeks have been a focus?
[00:24:09] Dany Davis: Yeah, Stony Clove is the biggest tributary to Esopus Creek, and it has also been the biggest source of turbidity to Esopus Creek. There was an original study going back [2009 to 2011] by USGS that demonstrated, especially during the Tropical Storm Irene period, that most of the turbidity that impacted the reservoir, a big proportion of it, was coming out of Stony Clove Creek, and you've lived here long enough. You can remember all of these big giant mass failures and landslides and erosion that were in this area after the 1996 flood and then the April 2005 flood. Multiple floods have really ravaged the stability of Stony Clove Creek, and Stony Clove Creek's valley floor is also compromised by all the roads and development that's in it, so a flood can have an impact on the stream, and it can take decades to recover. It might recover more quickly if it had more room to recover, but because it's got compromised space, it sometimes is going to require intervention to be able to do that, so Stony got that focus because of its being the primary source, and there were so many sites that we had plenty to work with. Stony Clove is now no longer the biggest source of turbidity, even though it's still and will always be the biggest tributary, so the biggest source of water coming in, it is now no longer sort of the top dog in turbidity production.
[00:25:39] Brett Barry: If it weren't for eight million or however many water drinkers there are in New York City, would we care about turbidity?
[00:25:49] Dany Davis: Well, there's more than the eight million that drink it. There's at least 9.2 million. That's the last number I've heard...
[00:25:54] Brett Barry: Oh, I'm behind in my stats.
[00:25:55] Dany Davis: ...and that includes all the people and communities between the boroughs and, I think, all the way up to High Falls now, maybe, that have access to this water, so any municipality that would drink this water would be concerned about turbidity, so from an ecological point of view, I mean, this is a natural part of this system. This is a part of... Catskill Mountain making is exporting sediment out of the valleys to create the landforms that we see. That clay is just a part of it. It's been doing it for at least thirteen to fifteen thousand years. The system has gone through periods of stability and instability, so there may have been times in the past where it wasn't ecologically healthy to have such turbid streams, but we have a very healthy trout population. We have high-quality water, so would we be [really] worried about it if we weren't relying on its drinking water supply? Probably not to the point that we'd be spending tens of millions of dollars on trying to clean it up.
[00:26:59] Brett Barry: So we're talking about thousands of years of processes, millions of years of processes. What changes have you seen in your decades-long study of this ecosystem?
[00:27:09] Dany Davis: Oh yeah, I love that question too. I was just thinking about that on the way here. I do think in terms of the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of years of history, but one of the things I love about being a fluvial geomorphologist is it is a dynamic environment, so I get to witness the change in real life, right? So I'm looking at it on the scale of decadal-scale changes. I've experienced, let's say, starting with the 1996 flood. I think Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999. Tropical Storm Ivan in maybe 2004. A 2005 flood in April, which was a big snowmelt and rain event. The crazy hydrology we had in 2010 and 2011, when Phoenicia [the streets] flooded three times in 11 months. On October 1, 2010, we had a flood of about 13,000 cubic feet per second, according to the gauge, flowing through Stony Clove Creek in Phoenicia. That was enough to get it out of the banks and going down Main Street. Exactly two months later, December 1, 2010, 13,400 CFS went through, and that was enough. I don't know if you remember, Brett, but there was a big gravel bar upstream of that undersized bridge on 214 that had willowed up, and it had forced the stream to split, and what happened was it became inefficient for transporting flow, so it had just started to fill up, and so after the December flood, you had to start to bend over to walk under that bridge, and then we had the tropical storm Irene, the flood of record for the Esopus Basin, and we have a gauge going all the way back to 1932. There had not been a bigger flood since then. That flood delivered about 14,000-some odd CFS down to Phoenicia and really wreaked havoc. There's sand dunes behind Brio's from that water. You could no longer get under that bridge without really bending over, so we had to go in and make a channel because it had filled in, and I don't know if you remember this: there was an excavator in the stream, and there were probably 30 dump trucks lined up along the road, and all of that sediment was going to repair roads that had washed out in Irene, so we were actually doing assisted sediment transport. We were helping the river get rid of the sediment. It could no longer process taking that and putting it where it could be put to work, so I look at that reach all the time. That was 2011 when we did that work. That reach is remarkably stable.
[00:29:52] Brett Barry: How has the magnitude of research changed since you became involved with this area? What are you collecting, and where is this research? Is it being stored somewhere safe and built upon for future generations?
[00:30:05] Dany Davis: New York City funds a lot of this, and my job is to coordinate this one project right now. It's called the Esopus Creek Turbidity Monitoring Study, and it's a collaborative partnership with USGS, and USGS really does the lion's share of the work. You will find that many of the streams have these USGS streamflow monitoring stations. They have these distinctive little solar panels, and there's these little buildings that have the infrastructure in them, and there's a pipe going down to the stream that is measuring the height of the water and also measuring the turbidity and also collecting water for sampling sediment, so they're doing all of that work. There are 29 of those stations in Esopus Creek. 20 of those 29 are in Stony Clove Creek. Stony Clove Creek is probably one of the most instrumented watersheds in North America right now, where we're collecting... every 15 minutes in 29 locations across an 86 square kilometer watershed, or like 32 square miles, turbidity measurements, and in six locations, every 15 minutes, we're collecting stream flow measurements, so we're actually really able to monitor the pulse of flow and sediment through this. That is all USGS. You can go to that data online right now to see what the stream flow is, what the turbidity is, and what that means about how much fine sediment might be going downriver. We're also working with different universities. The University of Vermont recently is where we're a big partner with Cornell University, SUNY New Paltz, and the geology and geomorphology data that I've been collecting is also part of the record at DEP. In fact, what I'm doing right now, because I'm retiring in 11 days from now, is I am writing a guidance document so that people know where I've been hiding and stashing the data for the past few decades.
[00:31:57] Brett Barry: Yeah, so let's talk about that. It's going to be a full circle journey for you.
[00:32:01] Dany Davis: Yeah, well, I'm heading back home to Alaska. My daughter, who was born in Fairbanks... she has been working for the Kenai Fjords National Park and met her husband. They met in Seward. They now have a family with two children, and I really want to be with my grandkids. I'm in my sixties, and I feel like one of the best things I can do with my life right now is really give as much of my time to them as I can, so I'm heading back there, but I don't plan to just be a grandparent, so I'm taking three months to drive there. I'm moving from the Rondout Watershed to the Resurrection Bay Watershed. I'm giving it a name. It's called Rondout to Resurrection, and it's my attempt to go visit seven different river basins between the Rondout River Basin and then the Resurrection Bay Basin, so I'm going to be going down to the Smokies to visit the Little Pigeon River. I have a special connection to that river, and then I'm going to be heading to the Mississippi, which I've spent no time on. Then I'm heading into Colorado to visit rivers and a bunch of people in the fluvial geomorphology community, and then from there, I'm heading over to Northern California to the Klamath River Basin. Then I head over to Idaho for a packrafting festival, and I'm heading up into Canada and then into Alaska, visiting different rivers along the way and also working. I actually have to set up an office two times while I'm on the road because all the products that we're getting from USGS that are reports that need to be reviewed come in while I'm actually after I've retired, so I'll be working on that as well.
[00:33:38] Brett Barry: It's not like you're going to immediately lose interest in the project.
[00:33:42] Dany Davis: No, and in fact, I'm hoping to be able to come back in some way to help write the final reports. It's hard to start something, to conceive of something, start something, carry it all the way to the very end, and leave before it's finally done, but the time is right for me to get to Alaska.
[00:33:58] Brett Barry: Okay, a couple of big life questions. What have the rivers taught you from a non-geomorphological perspective about life, about yourself, maybe?
[00:34:09] Dany Davis: Yeah, well, one, I have learned to go with the flow a little bit more, and so I can relate that to streams. In fact, if I have an answer for "what is a river?"—that's one of my favorite questions we ask our students all the time—I could bring it down to two words, and that's "channeled flow," and it can be the channeled flow of water. It can be the channeled flow of sediment. It can be the channeled flow of whatever solutes are in the chemistry of the water. It can be the flow of life. It can be the flow of time. I've had to learn that in a number of ways. One story a lot of people here know is that in the midst of all this work, I also went through an entire gender transition, and I went from living as male for 40-some years to doing my attempt, living as a trans female, as a female in society for about eight years, and then was able to then move forward into living back as male, and this entire time, I was going through this, and this was very disruptive. This was the flood in my life, right? This was this big thing that needed to be dealt with, and I was raising a family, and I was loving my life, but I had to deal with this, and it was really disruptive. You know, so I mentioned my partner earlier, my friend Terry. That was one of the things that couldn't be sustained, right? It was disrupted in the flood. That was part of the erosion of the event, if you will, and certain parts of me went downriver that I didn't get to see again, but it was also liberating because it allowed me to evolve. It allowed me to adjust. Earlier, I was talking about how when you get a big flood and it maybe lowers the base elevation at the bottom of the stream and that triggers the response all the way up, the channel goes through an evolutionary sequence until it finds its new equilibrium. I was able to find a new equilibrium in life by, one, taking on the challenge of dealing with something that I had shame about. I grew up in the '60s and '70s in East Tennessee. It was when I became aware of this, and it wasn't something that one could deal with. I became a father, you know, really early in life, at the age of 22, and all of these things made it more difficult for me to sort of take this on until I was able to do this and, with the support of my partner at the time, really figure out how do I deal with this flood? Ultimately, the dam broke, and I just had to come out as trans, and the world was so welcoming. I had all of these relationships, professional relationships, and personal relationships. Some of the personal relationships I lost, as you're going to do in any flood, change is going to... you're never going to go back to what you had before. I don't know why I had so much respect and acceptance, but I was really grateful for it. I was the first person in the agency to transition on the job, and I thought, in New York City, maybe that would not be the case, and I called them up and tried to find out, and, you know, like, so what kind of resources do we have to help with this in terms of just communication, right? Explaining to my coworkers who I am, and so we were able to engage the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in New York City. That's a trans sort of advocacy organization, and the city was able to work with them and had this remarkable woman who came and talked to our entire building in Kingston, 200-some employees, and did a workshop on what being transgender is and involved, you know, people being able to speak freely. They helped me think of a letter to write, so I wrote a letter to all of DEP, and when I came back, I don't know how many hugs I got, you know, how many whatevers I got, and I'm not someone who would probably ever pass as, you know, a woman in society, but I definitely felt the need to express myself that way, and I never got any rejection. By turning around and going with the flow, this pressure, this need to experience this aspect of myself, I was liberated, but it was a really difficult balance to maintain, being a male-bodied person but having a female gender expression and being a dad and then becoming a grandfather, and I also really wasn't interested in following some of the other paths. I was on hormone replacement therapy. My partner for Christmas one year got me a free beard removal gift card, which was a lot of painful electrolysis to, you know, lose my beard, so I'd paid a lot to get this opportunity, and I got there and realized that I had gone with the flow, but now it was starting to feel like I was swimming upstream, and that it was beginning to be, like, in order just to maintain progress or to maintain this equilibrium, I was constantly having to work at it. It wasn't a sustainable equilibrium, so I gave it a lot of thought, and I spent a lot of time by rivers, sitting by them, paddling in them, walking in them, swimming in them, and really seeking guidance on, like, how do I go forward when I don't want to spend the rest of my life working to be who I am? I just want to be who I am, and I kind of remembered that—go with the flow, and it was really, you know, I love being a dad. That's my favorite thing in the world, and becoming a grandfather is amazing for me, and those are, for me, male-identified roles, and I already come male-made, so it was a lot easier to go, "Alright, I am trans, but I think it's easier for me to have a sustained equilibrium if I'm not working against the gradient."
[00:40:23] Brett Barry: Would you say that you transitioned back or found some kind of balance? Do you still consider yourself trans?
[00:40:30] Dany Davis: I consider, I think the most apt term or descriptor or whatever for me comes out of the indigenous communities around the world, which is a two-spirit nature, right? So I am both male, and I also have female in me, and it's—I'm male-bodied, so it's a hell of a lot easier to be a dude, and so that's why I'm a dude, but I have the capacity to also be comfortable expressing myself as female as well in a genuine way, but I don't feel the need to do it, so I can acknowledge it. I can be who I am, a trans person. It isn't really a going back. It's a going forward, so I'm going forward with now this acknowledgement, a bigger acknowledgement of who I am, and an engagement with and an acceptance of something that I couldn't before, so it's a forward thing.
[00:41:24] Brett Barry: And putting aside drugs and treatments and things like that had become a struggle.
[00:41:30] Dany Davis: Well, they just weren't something I wanted to maintain. It didn't feel like I was getting my—for me, personally, everybody's journey is different. I have many friends in the trans community, and when I was coming out and trying to figure out what the hell I am... who am I? There are advocacy groups in the area, and I went to conferences and really engaged, and there's so many different paths. The path for me has always been about authenticity, or at least, again, finding this equilibrium, and I didn't feel like medication or further, you know, medical intervention was going to make me any more authentic. Also, it felt like a commitment to being in the binary, and I find being in the binary to be very constricting, so I will generally express myself as male, but I don't identify as one and not the other.
[00:42:28] Brett Barry: What will you miss most about the Catskills?
[00:42:30] Dany Davis: Oh, God, yellow birch, yellow birch—it's pretty emotional actually. Sorry, yeah, yellow birch. I'm talking about the ones that are way up high in the mountains. They are centuries old. They were above where they were getting forested. They grow in the roughest terrain. It's all talus blocks. There's no soil. You see their roots everywhere, and you see it's this community. It's this collective of trees that have been here for centuries, upon centuries, upon centuries. They have beautiful forms. They look like dancers. I think it's this structural aspect of them that gets me the most at 2,900 to 3,000 feet elevation on Cornell Mountain above Cornell Falls, which is one of the small brooks that drains Wittenberg and Cornell Mountains into the Woodland Creek headwaters, which, next to Silver Hollow, is my favorite part of the Catskills: the Woodland Valley headwaters, and so I have visited Cornell and Wittenberg each well over 80 times that I've recorded, and most often I'm going up any different river valley I can get to. I've hiked all the different drainages, and I have found some of the most amazing yellow birch groves that I... will be with me till my memory is no longer probably functioning, so as much as I love creeks, yellow birch are like the things that I will carry with me. There's a lot of creeks I'm going to miss. I'm going to miss how accessible the terrain is here in Alaska, where I live in Seward, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula. I'm two blocks from the bay, and I'm four blocks from super steep mountains with really thick forest and grizzly bears and moose and wolverines, so it's like not nearly as user-friendly there, so I'm going to probably miss that as well. I mean, I'm going to miss the people.
[00:44:54] Brett Barry: Well, we'll miss you, Dany, as well, and thank you for all the work you've done to help us understand this place that we live in and these streams that flow.
[00:45:05] Dany Davis: Well, thank you, thank you, and the last thing I want to say about my science is the concept of connectivity. It's an emergent property when you think about how things are connected. Whether it's structural [it's one thing flowing from here to there], there's connectivity. That's with people too, and I feel like that's one of the things that I've been also building. We're trying to build a body of knowledge, but we're also building a community of knowledge, and I feel like a lot of people, and it's not just me. I'm just one small person doing this. I mean, all of the stream management programs are doing so much to get people better connected to streams and more aware of how to be good neighbors, so I feel like that's another really good thing to walk away from here having been a part of that story.
[00:45:56] Brett Barry: Happy trails, Dany, and when the Catskills call, just hit play. "Kaatscast" is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Sierra DeVito recorded our interview at Warner Creek in Shandaken. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas, and I'm your host and producer Brett Barry. Follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast] and connect with us anytime at kaatscast.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.