It was 1963. Our house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains had a creek behind it. One of my earliest memories is that creek. I was three going on four and these seem to be my very first memories. Of course, a carousel slide show could jog me all the way back to age 2 and memories of crawling around under trendy and sleek 1960’s furniture. Listening to Percy Faith and Petula Clark could take me back even further. My three year old memories include scenes of my mother packing us a picnic lunch and sending us off to the woods and creek to explore. And there are scenes in my early memories of being in the back of a car, no seat belt, joyously bouncing in the air as the car went over a hill on the way to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket.

This was the early 1960’s and mothers were accustomed to kids flying around in the car when they went over hills. And sending three year olds off for a day of fun and frolic outside with only their older siblings to watch them was the norm. Mothers were probably close by but we never noticed. My original heroes were the older siblings who seemed to be authorities on everything from snapping turtles to gravity and swingset dynamics: “don’t swing too high!”; to health and welfare: “don’t eat the sand in the sandbox!”; to hydrodynamics: “don’t go to the place where the creek connects to the James River!”. The James River represented everything unknown and dangerous in our little world. It was the same river that made the rust in the bathtub, the same river that stole our little creek and sent it to the ocean.

When we weren’t playing in the creek we would go on family vacations to the ocean and dig, dig, dig, until we reached more water! Then we’d lie down in the surf and clean all the sand off and head back to digging again. You shouldn’t eat the sand at the beach either, but we probably did. And we stopped being curious about the James River and rust in the bathtub because the ocean bathtub was huge, with waves, and sand dollars, and shells, and crabs and snails.

Flash forward to 1980 and I’m in college on a field trip at the Cannon River in Minnesota. We are throwing sticks in the river from a bridge and an unlucky classmate is standing in the river with a current meter and another with a stop watch. Does the stick method give us an accurate reading? I could stay out here all day, measuring and watching this river. I think, it’s like being three again. We meticulously take notes, and gather sediment samples for drying and sieving. When we get back to the lab we will make cross sections and river profiles, and compute sediment load, sorting, and other parameters.

I am carried back again to my early memories when we went to the creek and found a good rock to sit on for lunch and built dams and bridges, and sent leaves and sticks downstream to a fateful journey towards the mighty and scary James River. The voices of my classmates fade and I am transported back, my siblings shouting up and down the creek as we find rocks, and sticks, and bugs and treasures. In my memory, the creek dances with us and shimmers, and acts like a mirror, glowing on our faces. I can imagine us watching our little creek as it carries green leaves, then red, orange, yellow, and brown, all off to embellish the picture we have colored in our minds of James River water.

The leaves fell and 1963 was just about over we when wandered into the living room one day to find our German babysitter who we loved more than the creek, crying, the tears streaming down her cheeks. I sort of remember touching her face and tracing the route the tears made. She gathered us in her arms and told us a great man had died. The little creek ran all the way down her face, presumably on its way to the mean and mighty James River. We watched silently. My siblings remember the event better than I do, but what made the biggest impression on me as a three year old who was almost four, was the little three year old boy on the TV staring back at me, saluting bravely. I don’t recall what my parents said, I just remember that was a time when even our trendy and sleek living room was swallowed up by the outside world, and our faces glowed from the TV . The following years we would go back to the creek, to the ocean, and beyond. And every year the picture of the brave boy would get clearer for me. In the same way I learned to appreciate the complexity of rivers and hydrodynamics, I appreciate now the journey our little creek represented, as it gathered up its nerve and tumbled over the rocks carrying sticks and leaves, and a generation of kids like us.

(lwr Oct 7, 2017)