My mother rang a set of ceramic bells to call me back from across the brook for lunch and dinner. The unnamed brook flowed through my arm of the woods into Terwood Run which flowed into Pennypack Creek which flowed into the Delaware River which flowed into the Delaware Bay where the horseshoe crabs lived.I never saw any of the creek between the city line and the river. The water flowed east past my house and then mostly south. My life went west from my house and then mostly south. Friends, school, stores, baseball, turnpikes - all of that was west and south. After it flowed east past my house, I wouldn’t see that water again until Penn’s Landing, or some years, Lewes, Delaware where Uncle Rupert lived with a hole in his skull covered by skin and hair.
Viewed on a map, the woods were small. But they were large enough that I never made it to the other side by foot. Four roads framed the woods: Edgehill, Terwood, Paper Mill, and Old Welsh. Old names that reflected real characteristics, not contrived marketing devices like Fairway, Willowbrook, or Country Club Avenues that invaded from the northwest corner.
I lived someplace - Frazier’s Bog - at the foot of the highest hill in the county. When I was 17 and lived on the other side of the hill, I would walk up to the top. If it was dusk, I would climb on the roof of an abandoned elementary school – Woodside - and watch the sun go down over the city skyline and, further west, over the cooling towers of the nuclear power plant. If it was dark, I would climb the radio tower and look the other direction toward the twinkling lights of the two naval air stations.
A hundred years earlier, a famous naturalist had written papers about Frazier’s Bog. What could be found there could not be found anywhere else in the state. Over a dozen different plants - common to the Pinelands but uncommon here. Unknown anywhere further west. By the time I was born, my house and maybe four others had obliterated most of Frazier’s Bog. Ten years after I moved away, someone else came and counted. Three plants were left. Sweet magnolia and two others you don’t care about.
There was a small dam upstream from me. Mr. Dawson hung a swing in the beech tree that grew on the opposite bank. He shot the rope up into the tree with a bow and arrow. He said the Indians taught him. I assumed they lived there before me. Once, I saw the dam named on a map. The name meant nothing to me. It was not the name of a living neighbor. Being meaningless, I forgot it.
I was the only kid in Frazier’s Bog (except for my bookworm sister). I probably knew it better than anyone else alive. I knew where the deer skeleton was. I knew where the junk pile was. I knew where the six-pack of Miller was. I knew where the old stone foundation was.
I lived in that creek for fifteen years and never learned the name of anything else that lived in it other than crayfish. That knowledge didn’t exist in my family. My old man, 35 years later, could still recite the train schedules from all the games of chicken he played on the rails outside of Baltimore. But I’ve been to that house. He had no creek. Just railroads. Some families lose knowledge. Some never had it.
When I was 13, the woods tried to kill me twice. Once, Hurricane Gloria dropped a 100-foot oak on my bedroom. Wood splintered. Glass shattered. Knobby branches penetrated the roof and clawed at me but their timing was off and missed me by seconds. A few months later, a deer tick bit me. It took 10 doctors 13 days or 13 doctors 10 days to diagnose me with Lyme Disease. In the meantime, I waited, delirious, fevered, and generally unconcerned for a diagnosis.
Two years later, my mother claimed that the attempted murders were why we were leaving. But the truth was, by that point she had lived there five times longer than she had lived anywhere else in her life and was itchy to leave. Preacher’s kid. She’s never lived anywhere that long since.
We moved away. To the other side of the hill, as I said. Not far – maybe a mile - but far enough that we were out of the woods and the water flowed west through the Wissahickon into the Schuylkill River. The water followed me to school each day.
Teenagers don’t get nostalgic. I didn’t make it back across the hill all that much. No more ceramic bells calling me.
I went back a few years ago. A new golf course had isolated my arm of the woods. Frazier’s Bog had been reduced to a three-foot strip on either side of the creek complete with little signs that said, “Sensitive Habitat Area – Keep Out.”
What’s the point? No point. Shut up and listen. I’m talking about creeks.
(to be continued)
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