Volunteers Clean-up Bacon CreekI first got to know the good folks in the Bacon Creek Watershed Council (BCWC) when I went to work for Kentucky Waterways Alliance in 2002.

Bacon Creek had landed on Kentucky's Impaired Waters list thanks to the usual non-point source pollution suspects: sediment and sewage, both farm-related and residential. I was there to help the Council carry out public non-point source pollution education, in hopes of having a positive impact on Bacon Creek's water quality.

At that time the BCWC had also bravely entered into a decades-long struggle to obtain state and federal funding for a sewer system that would replace the nearly universal local use of straight pipes, which transport sewage directly from toilet to creek.

Kentucky ranks #1 nationally in number of straight pipes, not good for the state's water quality, public health, recreational use, or its stream biota.

Bacon Creek drains a big watershed, running from east to southwest across central Kentucky, through farmland, wooded hills, and small towns, ducking under Interstate75, coursing through the low-lying small town of Bonnieville, and finishing in Nolin Lake, a recreational reservoir just north of Mammoth Cave National Park.

Anciently inhabited by Native Americans, the area was settled by American pioneers starting in the late 18th century: many of the older homes today have a nugget of log cabin at their cores. When homes were modernized during the 20th century, with flush toilets replacing outhouses, few families on or near Bacon Creek bothered to install modern septic systems. Instead they let straight pipes carry waste directly to their beloved Bacon Creek.

Baptisms in Bacon CreekBetween that "tradition" and farm cattle cooling their bellies in the cool waters year round, Bacon Creek has become a very unhealthy place to play, fish, swim, or be baptized.

Life along and near Bacon Creek can still be idyllic, especially if you have the long community memory of its values and uses, still shared by local residents. Once a water supply and a good fishin' creek, Bacon Creek was also used by local churches for their baptisms, and was the focus of several Civil War battles over control of the Bonnieville railroad bridge.

Everyone today, from youngest to very oldest, has memories of Bacon Creek - its beauty, as a cool refuge in hot weather, its floods, and its family and religious associations.

However, over time, the quality of the creek water has degraded, and folks today speak fatalistically about its decline. They say that a dirty creek is "the result of progress."

Although some churches still carry out creek baptisms, they know it is a health hazard to be fully immersed in what can be, in places, an open sewer.

Older residents have told me that they used to catch big fish, and that there were lots of crawdads and other critters - but they're mostly gone. And then they say wistfully, once again, "That's the price of progress, I guess."

But there's good news - in just a few years, the Bacon Creek Watershed Council has made great strides to reverse these attitudes and to begin to restore Bacon Creek to better health, so that its traditions can flourish once more. I'll tell you all about it in my next entry.