Goin' Creekin'

Nothing felt better on a hot summer day than to put on your swimsuit and "swim" in the creek. This is probably about the deepest our creek ever got unless we were in the middle of a flood. To introduce you to the gang; Rita, Mike, and Mark are my siblings. Penny was my neighbor and tough friend who could whoop up on boys older than she was. Robin is Penny's little sister. She was pretty tough herself, ending up as a state champion arm wrestler. "Beetle" was also a neighbor. She came from a family that none of us were too sure about. Her real name was Carolyn, but her folks nicknamed her "Beetle" after a dog. That alone makes a person wonder. Beetle ended up getting married at 13, and it wasn't a "have-to" sort of thing. Heck, we didn't even know she was dating at the tender age of 13; then suddenly she got married. One week we were playing with our Barbie dolls, and the next week she was a wife. I doubt that she ever went back to school.

The creek (It was either called "Sugar Creek" or "Honey Creek") bordered our land. The creek was spanned by an old iron trestle bridge. Later on, it wouldn't have been safe to hang out around the bridge. Besides the pollution, drug deals went on there. Once in a while, we'd go creekin' up-creek. At a certain point this crabby old man would come out and tell us he owned the creek and he wanted us out of there. Once when Mom was along, the crab came out and started yelling at us about it being his creek. Mom yelled back and told him "his creek" kept flooding our property. Then he yelled back that he doesn't own the water--only the land under it!

Speaking of flooding, our creek flooded a few times a year. Normally, the water was probably ten feet below the bottom of the bridge. If it flooded enough to start coming over the bridge, snakes would slither up on the bridge pavement from the water. If it got that high, we'd expect within a few hours it'd be on our property. At one time the water got so high that it flooded clear up to Mary Sutton's place, probably a quarter mile up from the creek. For some reason, we never really worried too much about it--not even when one flooded night we heard a knock at our front door. When we answered the door, we found two men in a boat who said they'd gotten a call that we needed to be rescued. "Not us!" We were fine, and flooding up to our front step was something we were used to. So they backed up and left.

Our side of the creek always flooded because the other side of the creek had a levee. One year the levee broke and the "lower" neighbors got all of the water (I say "lower" because the land was quite a bit lower than the bridge, where our side was level with the bridge pavement.) A few of our neighbors ended up having to fill in their basements due to that flood. I don't think the levee was ever fixed. I don't remember any flooding on our side of the creek after the levee break. They may have even dredged the creek to alleviate the flooding.

The old iron bridge was eventually replaced by a non-descript concrete bridge. There was nothing wrong with the old bridge, based on how much effort it took them to tear the old one down. I haven't been near there in fifteen years or so, ever since Mom sold the place a couple of years after Dad's death. I don't think there are too many of our old neighbors left in the area--they've either passed away or moved.

We have a lot of good memories of our place on Paddock Road and the creek. I don't recall ever being bored growing up. You don't need a lot of toys when you have five acres in your back yard and a creek in your side yard. There was always something to do, and many times it would involve the creek. We'd take our dog there to cool off, and a couple of times a day we'd walk our ducks to the creek for a swim.

Kids, dogs, and ducks need a simple pleasure like a creek.