"Everything is flowing going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rock . . . While the stars go streaming through space pulsing on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart." ~ John Muir
The first stream I remember playing in we weren't supposed to be playing in. My mother had sent my brother and me out to play, out onto the face of the prairie on a cold, sub-zero winter's day. We had tired of sledding and making snow angels and hiked out into the coulees. My brother, smaller and younger than me, was struggling with the deep snow. I told him to walk in what appeared to be a rut, where the snow seemed less deep. In he stepped, and in he sank, into a stream hidden beneath the snow. At first I worried that he would drown . . . but the water only came up to his waist. Then I worried that he would freeze. I hauled him out of the stream and stripped his clothes and boots from him. While he shivered and turned a frightening shade of white/blue, I upended the boots and emptied them; wrung out his clothes. Then I redressed him with the addition of my scarf in one boot and my mitts in the other and my extra layer of sweater wrapped around him. We trudged home numb and beyond cold. Then I worried that he would tell my mother. He never did.
Another stream I remember was also a prairie stream. We were older now. We were staying at a friend's farm. My brother and the three sons who lived there went to the stream to catch tadpoles. They numbered in the hundreds and the boys would bring home great mason jars of them that they left in the hot sun on the porch rail - soon forgetting about their captives in that careless cruelty that small boys engender. The water got murkier as the day's heat bore on and the tadpoles swam slower and slower. The daughter and I would wait until the right moment then fetched a wagon while the boys were busy with something else. We loaded up all the mason jars of infantile frogs and hauled them back to the stream. There we freed them into the bubbling water. They floated and bobbed about, having us think that we had waited too long. Then suddenly they would whip their sperm-like tails, right themselves and scurry away - as though the stream had made Lazarus' of all of them, bringing them back from the dead.
Before we moved here to our farm we lived in a suburban area bordering on the city. There the streams flowed beneath the streets. They are called 'lost' streams. Streams are characterized in environmental reports as either wild, threatened, endangered, or lost. The ones that are lost are those that have been built or paved over but still continue to flow in the subterranean depths beneath the neighbourhoods. Landscapes eclipsed by development. Streams lost and forgotten. The streams remember though:
"Listen; the buried stream gurgles its longing to return to daylight and moonlight: to nourish ducks, bracken, ferns, salmonberry, and newt; to live." ~ Anon
It makes me deeply sad to think of lost streams, like Peter Pan's lost boys running through the forests, looking to be found. I imagine those lost watercourses yearn to be wild.
Here at Fat Hummingbird Farm we have a stream. It has been quiet most of the summer. I feared we had lost it, though there has obviously been enough incipient moisture to keep peeper frogs happy and singing, and even the occasional sonorous bullfrog. It is fall now, though, and the stream has reappeared, running strong enough to chortle over stones. The stream bed is quite deep and I have been told that in the spring that stream will be a torrent.
Over our stream there is a wooden bridge. And nailed to a tree beside the bridge is a sign that says 'Max's Bridge'. Max is the grandson of the former owners of our farm. From what we have been told this Max is a precocious, fairly wild child. The stories of him remind me of that child Max that appeared in Maurice Sendak's book Where the Wild Things Are. The Max in that story misbehaved and was sent to bed with no supper. So he ran away to an imaginary island where he became the King of the Wild Things. Let the wild rumpus start!
Wild boys, wild streams. I love that our stream is wild and not lost. I love that the bridge was named for a wild child. I love that the stream has come back to sing full-throated. And though we have no Max living with us the sign on our bridge will be staying. To signify a wild child sitting on a bridge, swinging his legs, over a wild stream where the tadpoles wriggle their butts and swim to the river.
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