Low Tide
We had discussed hunting the little creek for nearly two years. Beavers had worked diligently to slow the waters flow, transforming a lazy cut between properties into criss-crossing channels and quiet pockets perfect for dabbling ducks and clucking geese.
Last week, armed with a Chainsaw and 34" brush cutter I zig-zagged my way under the canopy of an Aspen grove to reach the creeks edge. The remnants of an old hay wagon lay to the side of my new path, a reminder of different times, slowly dissolving into the forest floor.
I stood on the creeks edge with a child's delight, it was so deliciously peaceful. I had seen birds and I could hear nothing of the man made world. It was me and the call of a raven, the lowing from a bossy cow, and the beating of my own heart. A growing anticipation and yearning for cool mornings and gentle sunrises played through my mind.
I bought a little Jon boat last night from a 16 year old boy who had hunted mallards out of it with his Grand Father. It is a little nondescript Jon boat, a perfect platform for my dog and I to waste away a gorgeous fall day in a little creek, and maybe for my boy too, in those rare opportunities when his girlfriend is otherwise occupied and he wants to be with his dad.
My boy helped me haul the little Jon boat to the little creek, and I was so excited to share all that beauty with him. I wanted him to taste the anticipation as I had for days. He walked towards the creek bank and yelled back to me, "Where is the water?". Amusingly I yelled "It's right there buddy", as I broke through the forest wall to find all of it had been for naught.
Unbeknownst to me, a local farmer had visited the little creek the night before and pulled the beaver damn asunder. Like pulling a plug from a tub, the water was all but gone. The criss-crossing channels made way to mud stained grass, the quiet pockets left no trace save for a faded waterline, reminiscent of the pencil marks we leave behind as our children grow away from us.
I was speechless, all my anticipation drained away.
Later in the evening my boy and I sat in our usual chairs, at our usual little bar, he with a soda and me with a brew. The first song to play on the jukebox was Merle Haggard's Kern River, a tragic song about lost love. What seemed so cosmically mocking at the time, resonates now as I write this. I know the beavers will bring my little creek back, and the ducks and the geese will return, but time will take my boy away and this moment for which I was so excited, was never meant to be.
