Up the Creek

Today, I'm taking a detour from writing about places I used to live so I can reminisce about the creek near my parents' home in Cupertino. I still have to go and take a current photo of that house. I haven't seen it in a few years, and it has changed ownership again since my dad sold it.

Near the house, behind Wilson park, is a creek. I can't remember exactly what the creek is officially called because we always just called it "the creek". Like many children who grew up in the seventies, we often played outside until the streetlights came on. The creek served as a porthole to adventure. We caught toads, found interesting trash, and generally had a fine old time. I remember once seeing a Tiger salamander in the creek, which is still the only time I've ever seen one in the wild. Strangely enough, we didn't catch it and bring it home, as I did with so many other creatures we found. I remember once catching so many toads that I had to take off my socks to carry them in. At my current job as a naturalist, I discourage kids from exhibiting this kind of behavior because it's a sure way to depopulate the wild. I can understand the impulse though. I loved the creatures I found and had no conception of the potential harm that catching them and keeping them could cause. This early fascination with wildlife eventually led to the job I have now.

I remember my best friend Steve accidentally dropping a nail-studded board on my head. Blinded by blood, I did my best to take revenge, but my mom (I think it was my mom) stopped me.

I remember our excursions upstream toward the beckoning hills, through tunnels and around half submerged shopping carts, up embankments and over boulders, ever onward. I think we only made it all the way to the hills once or twice. We were still pretty young. I remember stopping at the railroad tracks to lay down coins on the rails. Once, we even put a good sized log on the rails, which the train made short work of, turning it to kindling in an explosion of wood.

Once, I almost drowned when I jumped into a rain swollen creek and nearly got swept into a long tunnel with water filling nearly the entire space. Lesson learned.

Another time, during the dry season, we decided to walk through one of the long tunnels but didn't have flashlights. One of us had a lighter though, so we fashioned crude torches by wrapping some old clothes we found around two or three stout branches. It actually worked.