Second Shot

Shortly before my 7th birthday, in 1938, my father died. Despite having two small children (neither of whom was consulted or forewarned, I might add) my mother was soon snapped up by a lawyer (or she snapped him up, though it would have to have been both -- people neglect to give the real reasons why they marry almost as much as they omit telling exactly why they divorce). We moved from D.C. a few miles out into Maryland, into what was then largely the country but now very much more is not.

Across the road from our house and beyond a barbed wire fence, a large field sloped down to a creek and then up again to a white house occupied by people of allegedly the same color, set high in the distance. Quite often this field was occupied by huge, fearsome, lumbering beasts that to my dismay had absolutely no expression on their faces, and I couldn't tell what they were thinking. It couldn't have been much, because they spent all their time munching grass and from their rear ends carelessly dropping all over the place large, dark, smelly messes that were natural booby traps for the feet of carefree kids. Those monsters held no fascination at all for this city boy, and I was always glad when they were nowhere in sight.

Once in a while in the first year or two of this marriage my stepfather's grandchildren by his first marriage, snooty city kids, threw parties for their snotty city friends, and those events were highlighted by climbing through that fence and loudly trooping down to the creek and making a general mess of things there.

That got me into the habit of playing in that creek, too, but not every day or even every week, because of the cows and because I had other far more important things to do. These tasks included getting ready to fulfil my childhood ambition -- to become one of what I even now consider to be those coolest of all Americans -- a Chippewa, a Sioux, or any other kind of Indian.

Nevertheless I spent hours down in that creek, mainly catching eels but also watching the whirligigs and water spiders and marveling at how they could so easily glide across the water as if on a dance floor, while I challenged nature by building large sand dams to hold back the water. And though they had nine years to do so, not once did any of those "white" people way up there atop the hill ever come down to chase my clearly trespassing and somewhat darker self off their property. In fact, I have no recollection ever of having laid eyes on them. And because no one showed up to dispute my claim, I came to look on that stream as being "my" creek.

Then, in 1948, a truly horrible thing happened. Some crews with heavy machinery showed up at the creek and they buried it. Overnight my creek disappeared inside a gigantic pipe, which was then covered over, and the cows and their numerous plops and the field itself disappeared, to be replaced by hordes of ugly new houses and other junk. My wonderful creek was gone forever.

Mercifully that was the same year that my mother moved us back into D.C., as five years earlier my stepfather had also died, and the estate had finally been settled.

Twenty-eight years went by.

In the middle 1970's, I was bitten by the "back-to-the-land" bug, which in that decade spread its ravages far and wide among people who were of a certain disposition. Against her better judgment my wife went along with it, and we found 20 acres of woods in Virginia, 175 miles from our home in D.C. The trees were beautiful enough, consisting as they did mainly of tall oaks, hickories, maples, tuliptrees, and other hardwoods that hadn't been timbered over for close to a century. But best of all, a shallow but clear and strongly running creek wound through that property for quite a distance.

It was like an exact twin of the creek that I had lost to suburbia long ago in Maryland, except with more shade and no cows!

And ever since then I've had a great time playing in it, too.

Once in a while life does give us second shots at things that we thought were gone for good, and more often than we might want to think.