The Creek
“Don’t go to the creek without your shoes on,” Mom would say on many a summer day before she left for work in the morning when my older brother Jay and I were boys. It was good advice, but we didn’t necessarily pay much attention to it. Back then, paying attention to good advice wasn’t high on our list of priorities.
We were living in a trailer home behind my grandparents’ house, just Mom, Jay and me. When school was out, most days would find me and my brother, along with whatever dogs we had that chose to go and maybe a couple of friends, walking the sixty-some-odd yards of dirt road down to the Bonita Creek. “Bonita” means “pretty” is Spanish, and to a marauding bunch of pre-teen boys, the Bonita Creek was, indeed, a pretty place.
The creek was fed from the overflow of a small pond across the road by a 3 ft.-in-diameter culvert pipe that was buried beneath the sandy road. Most of the time, the water trickled from the pipe into a small pool between the road and the fence. That pool was full of frogs, minnows, crawdads, the occasional snake, as well as various and sundry sharp objects lying in wait for bare-footed boys.
For us, catching crawdads was a big deal. They say the bigger the dog, the harder the bite, and I can confirm the same holds true for crawdads. Scoffing at my mom’s shoe admonition, we’d wade into that pool barefooted and start turning over rocks. Feeling around underneath them with our fingers until we either grabbed one, or one grabbed us, we’d catch as many crawdads as we could. We never ate them. It was all done for fun and the prestige of being the boy who could catch the most and the biggest.
If we didn’t feel like catching crawdads, we’d hop the fence and head down to a hole downstream a little ways and catch minnows with a seine fashioned out of a burlap sack. One time, we put some of the cooler-looking ones in Mason jars and tried to sell them from a make-shift roadside stand. Sadly, our entrepreneurial efforts went unnoticed, but it danged sure wasn’t for lack of effort.
And then, there were the BB guns. We hardly left home without them, and the creek provided an ample array of targets, some more appropriate than others, for us to test our aim. Nobody shot their eye out, but there were some close calls.
But the most fun we had was when the creek flooded. Mom would tell us, “Don’t play in the water. You’ll get impetigo.” We ignored that advice too, and a couple of times, indeed got impetigo, only I thought it was pronounced “infant-tigo” and had something to do with babies. Wherever it came from, the pustulous sores that we got from that little infant disease, or whatever it was, were not cool.
During floods, the water gushed from the culvert pipe and turned our tranquil little creek into a raging river. When this occurred, we’d take a pitchfork and stand on the road above the culvert pipe and try to gig gar as they passed through. My grandpa showed us how to do it, but he was much better at it than we were. We never had much luck.
Today, my mom tells me that the impetigo warning was issued over concerns about the stagnant water we often played in and not the floodwater, but that’s not how I remember it, even though she’s probably right. That’s the thing about time; things get fuzzier and fuzzier as we go. But also today, if I think about it hard enough, I can still feel the hot summer sand beneath my bare feet as we traipsed back-and-forth to the creek down that old dirt road. It was a beautiful place and time.
Now, the road is paved, and the water is gone. The big mesquite trees that used to line the tributary’s twists and turns down to that hole on the other side of the fence are no more. Everything has been bulldozed into submission and planted in grass, and that part of the Bonita is now nothing more than a flood control ditch for shopping strips and an apartment complex.
I guess today’s technology and progress and those kinds of things are great and necessary, but I can’t help but think that the world would be a little better off if we had a little less of all that and a lot more bonita creeks.
Jon Brauchle spent 29 years as a game warden.
