Why I Like Rushing Water

I just had a memory from when I was a kid and wanted to write it down before I forget again. Whenever it would rain hard like today (well, not exactly like today, this is the hardest I’ve ever seen it rain, but you know what I mean), Mom would take me and Bobby and Mikey in the car and we’d drive down to the creek at the end of the neighborhood to see how high it was. Sometimes we’d go up to Parker and across and drive up the creek on that side too, all the way to the lake.

We were never in any kind of danger from rising water; our house was a block away uphill. Stormy weather has always fascinated me; maybe it was because of these drives that we would take. Mom would always point out how beautiful but dangerous the rushing water was.

The satellite photo at right is the creek and the trail at the end of our block. The little white pipe that runs across the creek at the top right of the photo is one of the pipes that we used to get to the other side when we’d go down there to play. I think that Bobby fell off of it once while he was trying to cross and Mike and I had to carry him, soaking wet and screaming, all the way home. We would try to catch minnows and we’d often find fossils in the chalky rock of the banks on the far side.

I think that if we were kids today, we’d never be allowed to go down there by ourselves. But we used to do that all the time; we’d tell Mom we were going to go play at the creek, and we’d just go. I don’t know that it was any less dangerous then for kids to be out playing by themselves than it is today (you could also say is it any more dangerous for kids today than back then?), but I kind of get sad when I think about the experiences like that that kids are missing out on today.