Creek

February Poetry Adventure Day 25

Shoal Creek, December 2022. This picture captures almost nothing of the childhood magic of the creek; but it’s what I have in my photo library.

creekbed in summer
green-scum puddles, dry wildweeds
fossil sharks lurking

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Shoal Creek.

Northwest Park was a site for birthday parties and school outings. There were cement picnic tables and benches under a pavilion. There was wonderful playground equipment— a slide, a merry-go-round, a giant sheet of metal meant for climbing that got roasting hot in the Texas summers. And there was the creek.

When I was little, crossing the creek was a daring thing. The teachers forbade it. They’d warn you you might fall in and get your shoes wet. We did it anyway. And yes, sometimes people ended up with muddy shoes and soaking, smelly socks.

When I was twelve we moved and the park and the creek were now within walking distance of our house. It was changed, though. The duckpond where the ducks once chased me, snapping at my small heels, was gone and in its place were retaining walls, basketball and tennis courts, and a baseball field.

We spent a lot of our childhood exploring the creek near my parents’ house. In the summer it was dry except for a few puddles here and there. Unless it rained.

Sometimes in heavy rains it flooded and it became a living thing, rushing and roaring, overflowing its banks, threatening to swamp the bridges. Creeping up into the creekside houses. Which was why they built retaining walls and overflow catch basins, to hold in its fury.

My brothers would find shark teeth fossils. And once there was an actual dig as they uncovered a fossil skeleton. I think it was a shark. It might have been something else. My sister would probably remember.

Once I walked home along the creek bed with a friend, all the way home from the shopping mall, about a mile and a half away.

For me Shoal Creek will always be The Creek. The archetype for creek.

Although Bull Creek is a close second, especially a particular magical spring day when the creek was full and my friend Leslie and I went wading in the cool water. I went back later, trying to recapture the magic, and the creek was dry. For me that day at Bull Creek is a private Eden, a moment of time that is always green and a place which I can never get back to. I almost wonder sometimes if it really happened or was only a dream. I wish I knew where Leslie was so I could ask her. But I lost track of her when I went away to college and don’t know how to find her.

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For more poems about creeks see Petra’s comments: