Saturday, March 8, 2014

The Creek

Much of my youth revolved around a stream that ran through the woods in which we rode our bikes on well-worn paths, smoked cigarettes after school and tried to thumb through illicitly obtained Playboys, some of whose pages stuck together after being left out in the elements, requiring delicate page-turning and the reward often turning out to be an unsatisfying one breast.
We hid our cigarettes in drain pipes. We rode our bikes on what eventually would become I-95 but was then just hard-packed dirt before contractors put down the asphalt. We would venture down to the train tracks and place pennies on the rails, which would melt into copper dots, blemishes on the silver, as the train passed.
We always just called it "the creek." We fished and shot BB guns and collected crayfish. The creek wasn't the stuff of my adulthood, the Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone trout rivers that I have fished, with pelicans and eagles and bison and bears in the vicinity. Or the rivers of northern Maine, where the moose seemed ubiquitous. No, the creek sustained catfish and carp and eels and sunfish, which I exalted in catching in my boyhood as much as I do trout rising to dry flies now. There we collected garter snakes.
Now my association with the creek involves driving over it on the long-completed interstate, but it still runs through my blood nevertheless, since there was born an unflinching fascination with nature. Parts of the creek, as seen from the roadway, appear narrower now than in my youth, and I'm unsure if that results from a changing perspective with age, since, in retrospect, everything to a me as a youngster seemed grander than the reality, or an actual overgrowth of vegetation. The house in which I grew up, the street on which we lived, our backyard, all seem relatively smaller to me now than before. Part of that might stem from my living in a bigger house on a wider street now. I can say with some confidence that areas of the creek have shrunk, with the vegetation beginning to clog it like an artery.
The cornfield that abutted the woods through which we traveled has long since disappeared, having given way to an AMC multiplex, at which I took my kids to see Iron Man 3, which sucked. Along with the movie theater, restaurants and an ice-cream parlor have displaced the cornfield. We used to steal ears of corn from that field, particularly in anticipation of Mischief Night, the Halloween eve on which one engaged in mischief. We would remove the kernels from the ears and, I think, throw them at houses and cars. We also used to write on car windows with soap. Such was our mischief. All the while we feared the farmer, for legend held that he rewarded such pilferers of his crop with buckshot in the ass.
On occasion I drive through the neighborhood in which I grew up, wondering what has become of some of the people who lived in those houses. Some of them I know about. My best young-boyhood friend lives in his parents' old house. My next-door neighbor growing up lives in my childhood house. But chain-link fences now block the entrances through which we used to access the dirt paths in the woods that led to the creek. Why I don't know. To prevent the nefarious types of activities in which we used to participate, like smoking cigarettes and leafing through Playboys?
Part of the creek passes by softball fields. After my mother had her first stroke and lived with my brother, and he let her wander off when they were grocery shopping, the police and my older brother and I drove around separately looking for her. The grocery store sits on the other side of the creek from the softball fields. I pulled into the lot at the fields and saw a few police officers driving through and flagged them down to ask if the were looking for my mother, also. They said they were. I asked them if anyone had checked the creek. They hadn't. So I did. I imagined finding my mother face down, dead in the creek that provided so much of the lifeblood of my youth. The circle come around, the mother who birthed me drowned in the creek that nourished me. The police eventually found her alive, wandering through the rainstorm.
Sometimes, though, I wonder what it was I sought as I sifted through the sticker bushes to the creek's muddy edge.


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