Thank you all for the warm welcome and great advice! I think I am going to rework the scene with a small stream running through the middle of the road and a small bridge spanning it. However I ran into some problems with along the way. I was planning on the stream being on a slight slope so I couldn't simply use the lake option. Instead I dug a channel with a displacement and painted shader. Then I created a surface layer and masked it to the same painted shader I used to carve the channel. Next I put a water shader as a child of the surface layer, and displaced the surface layer upwards to fill the channel. But it didn't work quite how I thought it would. In the renders below, the roughness, wave scale, and smallest scale of the water shader are set to zero to demonstrate the errors I ran into. Firstly, the surface of the water appears rounded. Secondly, the water shapes it's self to the exactly the ground below, even replicating the fake stones shader below. Does anyone know of a way to fix this or a better way to do this? I've been playing around with for some time now and can not find a solution.
