The Creek’s Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Names have been changed to protect the innocent
Last weekend, I saw this Facebook meme:
It stuck with me because I did, in fact, grow up playing in a creek all day every day in the summer, but it wasn’t a good childhood. I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one. I’m guessing that if you grew up playing in the creek, you had nowhere else to play. I know I didn’t.
It was the early seventies. My dad died when I was three and my mom was a bitter drunk who started with bourbon at lunch. My friend Annie and her brother Darrell were the children of my next door neighbor Sheila, who got pregnant at 16. Abandoned by Sheila, Annie and Darrell were raised by their kind, loving, elderly grandparents who lived in the house behind mine across the alley. Annie and Darrell had olive skin and dark, curly eyes and hair; people gossiped that their father was black.
Davy, Sheila’s blond, brown-eyed child with her second husband Stan, lived next door with Sheila and Stan in a conventional household. Annie, Darrell and I all called her “Sheila”; she had no maternal relationship with her eldest children at all. We didn’t spend time with Davy. He was a few years younger than us and as the product of a functional, traditional family, he didn’t fit in.
In those days, in that culture, Annie, Darrell and I were weirdos. All the kids we knew from school had two parents who lived at home. No one else’s mom lived across the alley and pretended you weren’t her kid. Other kids didn’t live with their grandparents. Other kids could bring their friends home because their mom wasn’t drunk. Never once in my childhood did I host a sleepover or invite a friend into the house, not even Annie. To make matters worse, even then it was pretty clear that Annie was gay, which was taboo in that time and that place, and in the conservative church Annie’s grandparents belonged to.
The creek was two blocks away. To say that we had a creek makes our environment sound very rural, which it was not. We lived in a small city, population approximately 40,000. In the late Sixties, our city was crippled by well-deserved race riots. I say well-deserved because it was then and is still a thoroughly racist place with active white supremacist organizations. The closest the riots got to our neighborhood was about five blocks away.
But the creek was like an oasis, not just of water but also of quiet. It was about half the width of the creek in that picture above, with tall oak and maple trees on its banks. College track fields were about thirty feet away on one side. On the other side was a wooded area that led to the cul-de-sac end of my street. It was leafy and shaded. There was never anyone else around but the three of us. There was a mulberry tree in the wooded area. We filled up on mulberries for lunch instead of eating at home.
We went to the creek because we couldn’t stand to be at home and we had nowhere else to go. The creek was pretty boring. It was thin and shallow, which is a pretty standard definition of a creek. There’s no point in going to a creek to cool off; even in the picture above the water’s only ankle-deep. There are only so many crayfish you can catch and dams you can build. We did build a dam every summer to create a swimming hole, but at best even that was knee-deep. If we’d had access to virtually any other parcel of water — pool, lake, river, ocean — we’d have played there. Or even a playground! We used to ride our bikes in the A & P parking lot when it was empty on Sunday. If you’re playing in a creek, it’s probably because you don’t have anywhere else to play.
The “normal” kids in the neighborhood were never at the creek. They didn’t feel compelled to get out of their house every day, or maybe they had other places to go.
If I could have happily been home watching TV in air-conditioned comfort, I would have been. But my mom was always home and always drunk. She was unpredictably mean. I could never relax because I could never know for sure what would set her off. Annie and Darrell didn’t really have any other friends that I know of. Their grandparents were really sweet and welcoming, but what pre-teen/teenager wants to hang out with their grandparents?
The creek was a refuge and an escape from our lives. When we were at the creek, there weren’t any other kids there judging our families. We felt safe and normal.
Now I live in a different state that might as well be a different country. I live in a truly rural area and I have a creek, but I never play in it. Not just because I’m a grownup, but also because I have alternatives: gyms, conservation land, my yard, my house, my friend’s pool.
I wonder where today’s outcasts go to play?
