A SAD LITTLE CREEK
As
I walked along a trail not far from my house, I enjoyed looking through the
trees at a little creek that ran beside the trail. For about 300 yards the trail and the creek
are very close to each other, and I could see down through the trees to a
miniature stream of water slowly making it’s way to somewhere. Engrossed in my thoughts of my childhood, of
the few creeks and trails that I had known then and of the pleasure they had
provided, I suddenly realized that there was something missing along this trail
beside my walk. Even though it was
squeezed between two apartment complexes, both having access to the creek, I
had not seen any sign of boy or fort. I
asked myself, “Where are the forts?
Where are the boys?” All along
the way I had seen place after place for perfectly wonderful forts built of
fallen logs, places that called out to me, “Hey old man, come here and arrange
some of my logs. I need for boys to be
playing, boys to be building, boys to be shouting, boys to be...”
But
there were no boys, there were no signs of boys where one log had been placed
upon another log, not one little trail running through the trees, not even
a rock that that appeared to have been bounced
off the head of a ten year old. And I
thought how sad this little creek must be.
Only a few years ago before the apartment complexes squeezed it so
tightly, there were deer and other wild animals that we would see stepping out
of its little forest to observe our suburb.
But now, there are no deer, no boys, no trails and no forts.
My
trail soon takes me away from the creek, but I continue to think about it’s
fort-less banks, about the trails that do not exist, about the little boys that
live beside it’s banks but do not play under it’s trees. And I think to myself,
how sad. How sad the little creek must
be, how lonely it’s trees, how sad it makes me, to think of how much fun those
little boys are not having.
Why is
my creek lonely? Why are there no boys
building their forts, no boys throwing rocks, no boys shouting insults at one another,
no little boys gloriously dirty, wonderfully happy, proudly wearing their
bruises and scrapes for savagely fighting off sworn enemies from across the
borderline of their kingdom?
And then I remember we live in a different
world than I grew up in. Today, little
boys are not often trusted with knives, hatchets, BB guns and other “dangerous”
toys that we enjoyed. Today parents
worry over much about the safety of such things. It all makes me sad. I think tomorrow I will walk on my treadmill.
Terry Bouchelle
