A Road Less Travelled

I went for a walk the other day. I walked down to the new elementary school and tried to find my favorite creek. It wasn’t there.

The new elementary school is built right where the old school used to stand. They tore down a rather ratty looking building and built a bigger, better version. They expanded the parking lot and gave the whole thing a polish. It would be like exchanging your older sister’s old broken-down bike for a brand new ten-speed. But the creek is gone.

The old school was a lot smaller than this new one. Coming at the school from the library there would be a parking lot, the school, then the school’s playground, a baseball diamond and outfield, then my creek. Across the creek was Beringer Park which was a pretty nifty playground. Beringer was the closest to our house so it was our default playground. If we were feeling really active we’d go all the way to Napier, but usually we went to Beringer. It’s gone now. The school now covers the old school’s playground, the baseball diamond, the outfield and the creek. Beringer is now the school’s playground.

This made me really sad. I spent a lot of time in this area when I lived here. This is where we were swinging in the rain and this is where the cement spider was. We’d take turns running and jumping on the cement tube and I’d straddle it and pretend I was riding a horse. We used to play tag on the big, wooden, playground thing. We pretend you couldn’t touch the ground or you would burn up. They tore the big, green wooden thing down and put a metal and plastic playground thing in its place. It wasn’t the same, but it was nice. It had a three story tube slide. I would lie at the top of the slide with my body falling and my head stationary and feel the wind as it whistled up the tube. My friend would sit by my head and we’d talk about this and that as the wind rushed past me.

I always liked to go to Beringer through the school grounds because then you could walk over the bridge. The creek wasn’t nearly big enough to warrant such a fine bridge as that, but I didn’t care. I like bridges; I liked them then and I like them even more now. The year it rained for days without stopping the creek flooded. We walked down to Beringer because there wasn’t any thunder and lightning and we needed to get out of the house and we played in the flooded creek. I remember thinking the creek had grown up into a river.

“I remember.” It’s what I keep saying about Beringer. The playground, the creek, the area around it was full of memories. There was the time Adiel tricked me into walked over a drainage grate while looking down. There was the baseball diamond we tried to walk through during mud season and Adiel almost lost one her boots. Actually, she was wearing my boots at the time. Once we started playing pretend baseball with a real bat and a pretend ball. Some boys stopped and asked if they could play with us. They got really confused when they found out we’d been playing without a ball. We would usually stop on our way through the sand to write something that certainly felt meaningful at the time. There were plenty of rocks in the creek for when we were roughing it and too adventurous to use the bridge. There was always the danger of missing your step and having a wet shoe on the walk home, but we were tough enough to brave such dangers.

I eventually found the creek last night. I was looking through a drainage grate and I saw some water go past. It was in the right spot to be my creek. The baseball field is gone, the bridge is gone and the creek can only be seen through a metal grate. I have my memories of the place, but they’re hard to hold onto when I’m staring at how things are now. It’s enough to make me want to stay away forever.