Autumn is for remembering The Creek(2)

 November 2, 2023, ano 4

Autumn is for remembering;

The Creek and Me (2)

I have learned memories are slippery things and can be very far from faithful as a record of the true event. As I recently put some of my childhood memories to pen, I have come to realize what a significant role “The Creek” played in my childhood. Having access to a creek that flowed year around and the ability to spend hours and hours exploring it unsupervised, taught me valuable outdoor skills, but more than anything else let me engage my imagination and over stimulate my curiosity.

The town I lived in was located where the glaciers of the ice ages advanced and retreated numerous times, depositing thick layers of alluvial soils, and left behind numerous lakes, potholes, and wetlands. At the time Indiana was surveyed, the area was covered with deep forests, open grasslands (more to the west), and loaded with wildlife. N Indiana was at a crossroads of trails and towns of semi-migratory Indian tribes, in fact, our county at one point had 4-5? Indian reservations. These were reservations in name only to my way of thinking, as in retrospect, it appears their principal purpose was to be collection points of gathering the few remaining Indians up letting influenza and alcohol do the dirty work before shipping the survivors off to Oklahoma. Since my childhood, we have recognized the error of our ways and now no longer use the term Indian but Indigenous people, tribes, or cultures.  This bit of our local history is a minor  speedbump to contend with in our historical narrative of God's hand in our settling of the area in the early 1800s.  In the 1960's the indigenous people who still lived in the area had just started to coalesce into a political identity and seek to redress for past wrongs.  A festival celebrating the removal of the indigenous people to Oklahoma went through several name changes, including "Trail of Tears", "Trail of Courage", "Trail of Shame" as the locals wrestled with This was Genocide or Divine Destiny.   

Finding artifacts of these people was not uncommon, particularly arrowheads made from flint, and we often used the excuse of “hunting for arrowheads” as an excuse to go down to the creek. At the time of my childhood I think the town’s limit ran up to the creek but not passed beyond it. Long before the 1950’s the creek had been “improved” by the application of a steam powered dredge and a compass, resulting in a waterway that ran in straight lines and efficiently drained the wetlands it touched upon. The spoils piles from the dredge work are clearly seen today. The water was clean and cool and provided a cool respite to the town boys on hot summer days. Just before the creek hit the city limits at the town’s cemetery, it took a jog and experienced a minor drop in elevation. Over the years in navigating this jog, the creek carved out of the gravel soil, a natural self-cleansing water bowl that was pretty much hidden from the cemetery by a thicket of marsh willows.

This had been the swimming hole for the town's boys since long before I swam there. It was just minutes from Main St on a bike. Turning off Main St, you peddled downhill about a block, went under the rail tracks using a narrow viaduct, a short distance away you veered to the left at the cemetery entrance, on a small road that ran along the edge of the cemetery and dead ended at a gate to a small field where the swimming hole was located. The road only had a small slaughterhouse on it, and I think it was little used and then abandoned while I still lived there. As kids, we occasionally dug redworms from the offal piles to fish for bluegills. Other than that, the area was deserted except if a funeral was going on in that section of the cemetery.

My older brother introduced my younger brother and me to the swimming hole when we were pretty young (pre-bicycle?). I think occasionally he had to babysit us and the swimming hole was a natural place to go on a hot summer day. We could play on the sand bar while he swam and mixed with his friends. Bathing suits were optional and a rarity early on, by high school swimming in cut-off jeans was more common. An unsupervised group of young boys spending their summer days swimming nude in a secluded location probably would be frowned on today.  

Because our dad worked at a feedmill, we had access to burlap bags, a necessary asset in the maintenance of the swimming hole.  In late spring, after the winter runoff, and the creek water was warm enough to wade in, the natural lip of the pool where the water exited the pool to continue its to the gulf, was repaired and raised to deepen the pool.  We would go down to the mill and sort through used burlap bags sorting out the ones that had holes in them.  Loading them on our bikes we would pedal our way to swimming hole.  The older boys brought shovels and twine to tie the bags shut.  With no adult supervision, and little arguing, the oldest boys filled bags and tied them shut. The next group drug them down the bank and positioned them along the lip of the pool, much like how they add sand bags to the top of levees during floods.  The littlest ones gathered up mud, sticks, seaweed and used that material to plug leaks.  The burlap lasted most of the swim season and somehow an unspoken understanding was reached with the land owner, the dam could only go so high before a backhoe was brought in and dam breached.  Years and years of this left the lip of the pool permanently elevated and the pool's bottom a mixture of clean course sand and pebbles.  It made a great swimming hole. 

My memories are all good, with the older boys explaining life's mysteries to the younger ones.

It was here I had my aha moment when an older boy explained why boys had a penis and girls only had a “dent” between their legs. He told me girls had a bunch of little babies stored up in their bodies and when a baby was wanted, the boy put his penis in the dent and jiggled one loose. It drifted down to her stomach where it stayed while it ate food from her stomach. Eventually it grew too big for her tummy and fell out of her from the dent. I gave that serious consideration, and the idea made as good of sense as anything I could come up with. It was here I learned what a foreskin was and never would King David’s dowry for Saul’s daughter be seen as a passing comment in Sunday School. When I asked my Sunday School teacher if he had to give 100 foreskins for his wife, where did he get them, as I had never seen any Philistines in our area? He told me since they ran out of Philistines a long time ago he got his wife for free, which seemed logical to me.

It was here I smoked my first cigarette and it was here I have my first memories of people asking about my scars without an adult present. When I was little, my scars were pretty red, or at least the ones I could see. As long as I kept my shirt and shorts on, most folks didn’t know the extent I had burn scars. But when you're naked as a jaybird they are impossible to ignore. Young boys are spontaneous and without hesitation asked questions and I don’t remember being embarrassed, and I have no memory of being made fun of. The subject was soon dropped and if it was further discussed in my absence I have no knowledge. Life was good for me back then; a bike, a sack lunch, a lil brother as a companion, and a beckoning horizon in every direction, what’s not to love?

bobb