Chodikee

Chodikee Lake is a body of water near where I live in West Park, NY, and I hike often to the oxbows at the northern end through the John Burroughs Sanctuary. The Black Creek enters the lake at the south and leaves it at the north, to continue through cascading waterfalls on its way to the Hudson River. If you canoe or kayak through the oxbows, you’ll encounter a cacophony of nesting herons, snapping turtles the size of garbage can lids, tall stands of invasive phragmites that both block and allow waterflow, and shallow warm summer waters that muddy easily. This near-estuarine meander, this autobiography of interests... The oxbows of the Rio Grande and Pecos Rivers around Big Bend in Texas also drift in my interior weathers.

Apparently this: According to one of (the Town of) Lloyd's earliest historians, Warren G. Sherwood, Chodikee is an Anglicized spelling of an Algonkian phrase “shadakee,” meaning "the place of the signal fire." The way the oxbows scribble themselves over the landscape is a constant fascination.