20 years after its founding, the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association threw a party as part of its annual meeting. They invited me to address the membership, to tell my story. Below is what I came up with to say. More on the organization's history can be found at this link, and I did a brief writeup on the event at my Princeton nature blog.
SPEECH AT ECWA’S 2019 ANNUAL MEETING AND 20TH YEAR CELEBRATION
Steve Hiltner, founder of ECWA
NOV. 17, 2019
Hi. My name is Steve Hiltner, and I founded ECWA 20 years ago. What I will aim to do in my ten minutes is to tell you something about my own story and about ECWA's early years.
I'd like to begin with a show of hands if I may. How many of you grew up in Durham? (a few hands went up) And how many of you moved here from somewhere else? (the great majority of the audience raised their hands) Now, I would say, and I think you'd agree, that Durham has a special feel that is deeply rooted and enduring. But of what is that feeling made, if so many of us began our lives somewhere else? That is one of the enigmas of Durham. All I can say is that though I grew up in Wisconsin and Michigan, I didn't feel like I'd found my home until I moved to Durham. And that feeling hasn't changed since I left, even though I'm happy in the town where I now live.
Standing here, I feel joy in all the faces I recognize, but also in all of you who I have yet to meet. If there are many of you I don't know, it is a testament to the fact that I am not alone in being hard-wired to Ellerbe Creek. Though it is fortuitous in many ways that I came to Durham, it is equally fortuitous that I left, because it made more room for others to develop a similarly deep connection to ECWA and the watershed, others much better than I at building the organization that I had begun.
My story is in some ways an immigrant's story. We think of immigrants as those who move from one country to another, but it is also true that even we native borns take on the aspect of an immigrant when we move from one town, or one state, to another.
When I moved to Durham, I had no ambitions other than to explore the new territory. I knew nothing about nonprofits, and had little awareness of watersheds. The only organization I had ever led was an 8-piece jazz-latin ensemble. Mostly I was grateful to my wife, Gabriela, for having extracted me from my life in Ann Arbor, a town I liked very much, but where I didn't feel particularly useful. As a plant person, I had a desire only to bloom where I was being transplanted. Gabriela was beginning her career as an professor at Duke University. In Michigan, I had collected a couple degrees in botany and water quality, had played saxophone in jazz bands, worked part time as a horticulturist, had taught piano to kids. When we moved to Durham, I had no particular career, but I did have for the first time in my life a clear purpose for being here on earth, as father to our new daughter, Sofia, born just two weeks prior.
Fatherhood was fortuitous in many ways. I like to think of my daughters as good luck charms. It was Sofia who led me to the creek, and later led me to the people who would help to get the organization going. And it was my wife's job as a professor that provided me with some latitude to pursue less remunerative dreams. What I brought to Durham, as an immigrant of sorts, was fresh eyes. Once I discovered Ellerbe Creek, I could see it not as the ditch so many considered it to be, but as a place of undiscovered beauty and possibility.
Back then, the creek often flowed brown with sediment when it rained. In the late 1990s it was sustaining deep wounds in the headwaters, where the DOT was beginning to widen I-85. I didn't know what to do about that. At first I hardly knew where Ellerbe Creek came from or went. But in my new neighborhood, I found things I wanted to do.
As a botanist, I could see that the parks and abandoned floodplains along the creek had become dominated by invasive species, and lacked many of the beautiful native plants I was encountering in my walks with Sofie at NC Botanical Gardens and at the Blomquist Gardens at Duke University.
It was my daughter Sofie who got me making frequent visits to Indian Trail Park, and it wasn't long before I began planting what I called "wetland gardens" in the wetter, sunnier areas of the park. These clusterings of native wildflowers were appreciated by others in the neighborhood, and I began wondering where else I could plant them. At some point, I became aware that the creek flowing through the park was called Ellerbe Creek. I discovered a woodlot across the road from the park, and got the idea of replacing its tangled jungle of invasive vines with native plantings and trails.
Over time, I began to see how Ellerbe Creek could become a unifying element in Durham, connecting diverse neighborhoods and peoples to one another, and how the creek's many abandoned floodplains could be turned into mini nature preserves. I wanted to bring the beauty I had encountered along the Eno and in botanical gardens into the neighborhoods where people live.
I searched for another organization that would show interest in preserving the undeveloped lands along Ellerbe Creek, but the small urban parcels did not fit the interests or mission of any other organization. It was like the story of The Little Engine That Could. The only way for the vision to become reality was to start a new organization.
Ellerbe Creek, and the power of the vision it spurred in me, presented a great personal dilemma. What I had brought to Durham was different forms of love: love of family, love of plants, love of music, words, and learning, but I had yet to develop a deep love of people. And yet it was people I would need in order to create places for plants to flourish along the creek. Thus, the evolution of ECWA involved also an evolution in me, from introvert to someone who became engaged in the community. I'm sure many of you have experienced your own personal transformations as well, through community work.
When a nonprofit starts out, it survives on a thread, on a shoestring. Each new board member, and you know who you are or were, is a godsend. Collaborators are so important. Taking on a community project alone seldom happens because it feels so very lonely.
I do want to at least speak some of the names of the people and organizations that made it possible to turn an idea into an organization and sustain it through its fragile early years.
The Watts Hospital Hillandale Neighborhood Association and the Durham Environmental Affairs Board were early sources of inspiration and mentoring. The retired Duke botanist Lewis Edward Anderson and his wife donated a key acre of land, the value of which allowed us to get a Durham County Matching Grant to acquire our first nature preserve. Leslie Nydick helped apply for nonprofit status. Mike Shiflett and Don Moffitt were among the many neighbors who were early supporters. Key early board members were Lou Perron and David Lilley, followed by Steve Williams, Robin Kirk, and Chad Hallyburton. Another generation began with Larry Brockman, Jane Finch, and Perry Sugg. And then came webmaster Tony Tchopp, Julie Holmes, our treasured treasurer Candace Turney, and naturalist extraordinaire Josh Rose.
Like the vision for Ellerbe Creek, ECWA's first paid staff position also grew out of caring for wetland gardens in Indian Trail Park. One day, when I was weeding one of the native gardens, a woman named Barbara Newborg, who liked to walk along the creek, came by and asked me "Does anyone pay you to do this?" I said no. She happened to have a foundation, and offered to pay me $10,000 a year for my work. Dr. Newborg was our first angel donor, and her BIN Foundation continues to give to this day.
What I left behind in Durham, along with a lot of friends and a city where I had felt more at home than anywhere else in my life, was a watershed association, of course, but also a lot of plants that I had been taking care of in the parks and preserves. I am forever grateful to Larry, Steve Cohn, Chris Dreps and all the others who have done so much to help ECWA prosper and grow since then. And I am so very grateful as well to Cynthie Kulstad, Perry Sugg, and others who have tended to the many plantings and habitats--the wetlands, piedmont prairies, and oak savannas whose continued health, diversity, and ongoing restoration owes to their knowledge and hard-wired caring.
I am in some ways, real and metaphorical, a scavenger, taking an interest in what the rest of the world has deemed unworthy of attention. My muse composts experience and turns it into music and writing. Wherever I live, I look for gaps to fill in the community, and try to make something special out of what has been abandoned. One of those abandoned things was Ellerbe Creek.
Yesterday I met ECWA's new executive director, Rickie White. Appropriately enough, we met on Durham city's West Ellerbee Creek Trail, which has played such an important role in ECWA's growth. Talking to Rickie, and seeing all of you here today, I feel it is safe to say that the Ellerbe Creek watershed is abandoned no more, is receiving the love and attention it so richly deserves, and is giving back to us in abundance.
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