The brooke meanders across the arboretum, a ribbon of tinged silver in the glint of the midday sunlight. The sky is overcast. The highway that clings to the arboretum’s side lets a cacophony of sound–the rackous booming of engines, the flush of wind when a car whizzes by–to permeate the otherwise peaceful air, as commonplace as the sound of the wind rushing through the trees. The sides of the stream are wide and gaping from years of wear and tear from flash floods. A pipe nearby signals that the brooke’s original course had to have been moved some years prior, and the sound of the water competes with the rumbling of racing cars.
The brooke has a small bridge that covers it. Peering down into it, fallen leaves that swirl amongst the brooke’s stream intermingle with discarded cans and pieces of litter, broken remnants of consumption that clog and bunch together along fallen logs in its path. It makes it look like there is a metallic type of moss that grows on the wood in this stream, pervasive and shiny, like teeth. The water struggles to move around it. Every once and a while, a piece will break off from its prison and bob and dip under the water like a sinking ship, until it gets stuck somewhere else, choking the brooke like it is wearing a necklace of soda cans and throwaway cups.