Creeking

about twelve years ago my favorite activ­i­ty con­sist­ed of some­thing i called ‘creek­ing.’ about 300 yards from my house, down a ravine and through a bit of new growth wood­land, you came upon the not very impres­sive Lit­tle William’s Creek. not impres­sive unless you are a ten year old boy. it was around 25 feet wide at the near­est point to me. not very deep though, and if i just want­ed to ford the damn thing and not get wet i only had to plan my route from rock to rock very gen­er­al­ly.

there were an abun­dance of craw­dads in said estu­ary. i used to catch them and live in fear of their tiny ittle bit­ty claws. some of those bas­tards were mean. i would catch mul­ti­tudes of them and pit them against each oth­er in lit­tle pools. the one that was vic­to­ri­ous over all the oth­ers had the hon­or of being smashed by me on a nice sun­warmed rock. i was a despot­ic god to those craw­dads.

if you went down­stream you came to a golf course. which i golfed on many a time with my junior size clubs. but it was no man’s land if you were creek­ing.

upstream about 300 yards was a bridge. it was scary. all kinds of graf­fi­ti under it and lots of it was racist. i thought the Bad Boys were respon­si­ble. if you went upstream even far­ther the creek got deep enough that you could actu­al­ly see fish swim­ming around. and water moc­casins, but they did­n’t real­ly scare me. the water also became a deep green-blue col­or in these deeps parts. it was a swim­ming hole. and when the light was right, it looked right out of Clu Gulager short.

Lit­tle William’s Creek also had a lot of large trash in it. Old tires and rims. An ice­box so old it was bare­ly iden­ti­fi­able, beer cans galore, twist­ed pieces of met­al, a plank, a seem­ing­ly ran­dom assort­ment of every­thing.

try­ing to remem­ber every­thing that the creek meant to me is like try­ing to make a space­ship out of the name­less bits of flot­sam and jet­sam that would stub my naked feet and pro­vide hid­ing places for the ter­ri­fied craw­dads in the stream of my con­scious­ness.

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