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.