Where humans are mostly hands-off, Gills Creek returns to wild roots

From the road, you see only a khaki hat bobbing where Clinton Seawright stands on the banks of Gills Creek.

He tosses a line into the water beside the sharp bend of South Beltline Boulevard and wiggles the lure, hoping to tantalize a bass but mostly catching the attention of scrawny brim.

His dad used to say you can’t kill time, so he guesses he’s just wasting it with his fishing pole in hand.

“If I could fish seven days a week I would,” the 40-year-old from Gaston said. As a kid growing up in Columbia’s old Hendley Homes community and later along Timberlane Drive, Seawright used to walk the railroad tracks that crossed Gills Creek just southeast of downtown and drop his line in from a tall wall.

South of the bustle of Devine Street and Rosewood Drive, Gills Creek slips through sleepy neighborhoods as it slithers toward farmland, swamp and, its goal, the Congaree River. Leaving the city, the urban creek returns to its rural roots.

“Solitude,” Seawright feels, though cars whiz past on the road above him. The earthen bank beside him has been shorn by the creek’s recent swell. “As long as I’m out on the water, can’t nothing make me mad.”

The creek’s contrast

All along Gills Creek, large sections are contained in unnaturally straightened, or channelized, banks. That changes once the creek reaches Bluff Road, about a mile as the crow flies from the South Beltline fishing nook often visited by other fishermen like Seawright.

Deeper, straighter, narrower channels allow us to control where the water flows and orchestrate development around it. But they take away the creek’s ability to spread outward naturally and slow the flow of water during a flood.

Instead, when it’s inundated with water, the creek is forced to gush with great speed and great strength through the channels we’ve created.

That’s partly why some areas – consider the newly built Rosewood Crossing shopping center and nearby title loan businesses on Devine Street – suffered so greatly after October’s historic rainfall and resulting flood.

The case is different on Kirkman Finlay’s farmland.

More than 3,000 acres belonging to the Republican state representative for Richland County, plus thousands of other rural acres belonging to other owners, flank the creek where it finally returns to its natural path below the city.

It’s curving, meandering – flowing where it wants to flow, being what it wants to be.

‘Walk back in time’

“It’s probably the last section of Gills Creek that is unimpacted or, let’s say, (not) severely impacted by development,” said Finlay, whose great-grandfather farmed the same land a century and a half before him.

“I think it adds a really interesting component to the city,” he said of the land. “I mean, how many cities have literally 3,000 to 5,000 acres abutting them that are undeveloped creek farm?”

Gills Creek enters the Finlay farm through swampland, a canopy of old-growth trees sheltering the stream that rises and falls – sometimes disappears at the surface – depending on recent rainfall.

Wild little pawprints as well as stray tires and other litter, decorate the slick, muddy carpet.

The creekside road turns to gravel and dust as it cuts through lush fields of corn – stalks so tall the tassels sweep against a painted canvas sky with clouds like perfect brushstrokes.

The creek cuts away from the road and crawls somewhere among the fields, hidden, solitary.

“It’s sort of an area that you walk into and, other than modern machinery and maybe asphalt roads, it’s probably not a lot different than it was 100 years ago,” Finlay said. “It’s kind of an interesting walk back in time.”

Here, Gills Creek hasn’t changed for decades, and it probably won’t for many more to come.

Flowing onward

The promise of bottomland forests in Congaree National Park lures the creek to its final destination, the Congaree River.

Where Gills Creek empties there – mere miles, but seemingly ages away from the city – it empties part of us, too.

The creek carries pieces of us from its top to its bottom, along every foot of its path – everything we’ve poured into it, everything we’ve asked of it, and now, everything it has surprised us with.

This story was originally published September 9, 2016 at 4:18 PM with the headline "Where humans are mostly hands-off, Gills Creek returns to wild roots."