Rivers of Concrete

I often look at my car window as I pass a thicket of forest, or cross over a bridge and look down, hoping to find a creek. I wonder what it must have been like three hundred, four hundred, or maybe a thousand years ago. Were the ancestors of these trees giants? Was the creek filled with trout? Or did salmon once make their yearly runs here? Most of the time the bridge just crosses another concrete river. Even if I do find water it holds no trout. The trees are thirty or forty years old, they grew after the last farms sold their land to the developers. And they won’t last long either. Land is too valuable here; they could squeeze in another development filled with houses picked from a catalogue.