Half Mile Creek (New World Villers-Cotterets)
Dumas fils
Swan creek was only half a mile long with a block wide tree line. Its waters came out of the ground up by McIlvaigh Middle School and ended its half mile existence into a 6ft tall cement city drain. For perhaps hundreds of years it just came out of the ground that way and went into the ground that way; and some tribal administrations had named it Swan Creek. But to us school kids it was Half Mile Creek and a twenty room library of the most meaningful classrooms that any youth could ever have.
So, the summer I became 8 years old, there I was, 88 paces from my corner house in the project area called Salishan, sprinting through the high ceiling hallways going from class to class. I didn’t care what day of the week it was, or if it was over ninety degrees outside, --I was in summer school; I was in Half Mile Creek listening to the birds and the dragon bees. Every day I was there in its air conditioned rooms. I ran through the brightly lit meadows that separated dark caves of shade made by the vaulted verdure that domed pathed and unpathed orchards. If I got there first I could eat as many newly ripened salmon berries as I wanted, or bear-grovel on the blue berries and huckleberries which grew on dead stumps.
This was library time, in which each breeze sublimated to me : “The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships—and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings…” And so I learned: each maple leaf was a page, each turned rock presented the root spine of an old book, and each thirsty suck I drew from the creek carried daily all the iciness from Mount Rainier 26 miles away. And oh, my trees: they communed to me ‘imaginative things’; they would let me handle the map-back of their tent-green hands to discover that, like mine, theirs also were moist palms made up of living veins. Each Grey was an over-measuring mentor; I sat beneath their grandfathering weight pretending I was Dobie Gillis, the thinker, my bony back to their deep wrinkly bark—safe in the power of their long life.
I also learned to trust the rotted bridges. I wondered long about last years moss still flowing in this years stream. Suddenly, ‘I heard someone crying’ an eighth of a mile away. It was a she-male shrieking the word ‘snake’, and though I had already read many ‘snake books’ by then, as one of the Masters of this jungle, I came running anyway toward the voice of the Jane person. And there, all the other eight year old Tarzans in our tattered t-shirts would crowd in close, checking our eyes downward onto the writhing, infeared zoology at our feet. I saw how each face had its own unusually new movements, movements that altered with the animal’s ever-attempts at escape from our poking torture. While we Tarzans were knowing, the ‘boys’ squirmed and half hid; others ex-spelliated bunches of how-come questions. I spied into each new expression and learned, from old or young, what this all meant to them, and, as usual, didn’t refuse the inscoriation when life’s careful imprinting began to tickle-write all over the white beneath my healthy black skin. After the garter snake was beaten (none of the Masters were old or wise enough to let its slithering glide stay in the grasses) we stood over its dead body telling people, who we didn’t know the names of, zoo stories that began with, ‘one time in Half Mile Creek I saw…’
Sometimes a whole nine hours were spent in Half Mile Creek and when the trek of sun moved the immense shadow of all its trees from west to east, you knew it was time to go and ‘check it in.’ The East-West Sun clock never failed—but it was never really welcomed either. No one wanted to leave this summer building, and so when called to dinner breaths grumbled, sobbed, or if prescient enough, the owner of breath would backpedal up the incline still planning with us on a later meetup. These children were the ones I truly learned how to do business from, and I observed how they comfortably owned a large portion of their lives. I believed they concurred with me that all the abstracts we had encountered so far proved that the library in Half Mile Creek was a college also—one that degreed in the native business of life.
During the long ‘nothing doing’ days, we made sails from found deserted t-shirts, and hulls from broken sticks, and floated boats on the traveling waters. We’d start up by McIlvaigh Middle School and it took several hours for us to run the half mile rapids that lead to the foaming pool around the City Utilities drain. But we did it and were not really unhappy when later comers asked help to build their boats, or when arguing diversions erupted along the way. Many times I had to pull my doctor tools out and wash a hand in the cold sterile stream to wet the sliver before poking one of my mom’s sewing needles into the retractive twitching hand until the stake was out. I was the doctor. The older kids brought their injured siblings to me because they knew that if a younger one was brought home slivered, the parents of that clan might make everyone stay in.
And we almost saw ghost too in Half Mile Creek, --hain’t things that brushed by you when you scooted under new brush; or were banged by a half hard, quick flutter of a thing but felt no sting. You would stop, shiver for a moment, and then hurriedly leave that spot.
In the black pools of the sidewaters I saw a darker face rippling back at me; there on the surface of these pools I smelled his breath as we fished for the quick darting bullheads. I taught Probies—at eight, me the teacher, for once—how to broad jump the river, made historic climbs to the top of the many ravines, and renamed trees that are still growing even now 62 years later. I remember mud-puddling soft creek rocky-roll bottoms in my red ball jets tennis shoes as I leg-swam the shallow icy lake in the too-hot, tree-less region where the boat dock was.
Throughout the summer we loudly partied in the large cool shadows. In war pow-wow fashion we decided leaders who then sent out hunters to capture frogs, lizards and centipedes. Then something began to stretch the shadows and we entered the Stop Days: it was the start of Fall. This began our mesmerization by the last swarms of mayflies dangling in the forest sun-lances of light. I remember, many times, us staring upward and whispering cemeterily as one, ‘they’ll all be dead by morning.’
Then when Fall had truly fallen, a week after we were back in real school, an Indian summer would linger. It was then that we knew summer school was finally at an end. Now, years older, we know that Half Mile Creek was just redressing and was preparing to entertain us with a new art wing of the institute that always outshined the art we did at school. Living art, so varied, now blush-splayed outward on bobbing branches romped by squirrel that nosed through autumn’s reds and yellows and browns. We now saw mature leaves which flapped their silvered undersides from time to time to reveal flashes of nova into the now stranger-cool and mellowed glow. This signaled the end of the perfect ‘summer place’ we knew as Half Mile Creek. And with watchful eyes we scanned the slow ebb of light-tides as Half Mile Creek slid under the coldness of the frosts in order to preserve the many things this small vale meant to us; until next year when again we would group-run from house to house, yelling out loud, “Come on! Let’s go down into the creek!”
In memory of Swan Creek Library (Now closed)
In memory of Villers-Cotterets, France (Still Open)
In memory of Villers-Cotterets, France (Still Open)