The Streams that Cross the Property

over the stream and through the tall grasses

We have a number of streams that cross the property.

There is only one that I know that slips off of the end of my tongue easily: the little Canadian stream.

I know that stream because for over 50 years I have watched children play beside it, changing its course as it flows out of the bushes and onto the small rocks and down to the sand and the water.

Alice gingerly puts one foot forward

I wonder how many times its course has been split into three or four rivulets, or how many times there have been pools built there where little fish that have been caught, have been stored and have been let go again into the lake.

For the names of the rest of the streams, I had to ask Glen.

The second of the well known streams flows out of the woods just before Sandy Beach.

Probably few people know its name: Robinson after the people who owned the old house before Doral bought it.

Alice, thinking of crossing the creek
... I love that purse slung over her right hip ...

Campbell Spring is both where we draw our water, and the stream that crosses the corner of my lot.

Campbell Creek is the stream a little further west has been renamed at our house.  Once David and his mother stopped to watch a moose down in that creek as it was drinking water.

David was young.

He saw the moose pee during his observation that day so sometimes we call that stream Moosepee, but everyone else on the property knows it as Campbell Creek.

There are other significant features about Campbell Creek.

Betty in the forest with her gold purse

One is that over the years children who want to catch frogs go there.

On the Trans Canada Highway side of Pillings Road is a culvert that catches water that goes under the road.

The stream is easy to cross as a person walks uphill.  The water is only a few inches deep in some places, and there are even shoals of gravel to jump on, going from one to another to miss the stream. There are clumps of tall grasses and thick carpets of moss.

I could see no evidence that other people have walked there this season: no broken twigs or branches, no places where the ground is visibly trodden.

I didn’t know any of this until I was taking Michael, Alice and Betty on an adventure today.

“Let’s catch frogs,” I said.

 ... Alice handing off her binoculars to me ...

As we stood at the curve in the road, looking at the lake side of the culvert and me wondering if I should let Michael scale the steep drop to the bottom of the river bed, Connor and Kylee stopped their Delica Van and asked us what we were doing.

“Going to catch frogs.”

Connor smile at them.

“You are in the right place. This is where I used to catch frogs when I was a little boy.”

Connor and Kylee  drove on and we decided to hike up the creek, since Connor had testified – yes, indeed, frogs were in this territory.

Michael balancing on high logs in the forest

 behind a wall of small sticks

... Betty trying to go around small branches and between log pieces of deadfall ...

I hadn’t gone very far before I knew I was out of my depth on the climb.

The sides of the hill were too steep. I could feel myself walking on the sides of my runners.

Perhaps I should say I was slipping downwards toward the creek on the sides of my runners. The deadfall was too high for me to climb over.

The path upward had too many trees for me to dodge, too many dead limbs knocking my hat off, and absolutely no way for me to get the walking sticks down to feel any stability on the ground.

“Can I use one of your walking sticks,” asked Michael.

... Michael, waiting for the 3 of us to catch up ...

“No way. I need them both.”

The children ran ahead, calling back, asking me why I was so slow. “Are you always going to be the last one, Grandmother.”

“If you will just let me get ahead, I will be in the lead,” I said to them.

But there was no way for me to pass them. I was thinking, “If I get out of here without a broken bone, I will count this as one of the really lucky days of my life.”

... Betty crawling under a large log ...

Michael, Alice and Betty already spend a lot of time hanging from the modern day equivalent of monkey bars, swinging across them, or trying to balance themselves as they walk along high logs.

They were in their element, climbing under logs, pushing branches aside, and testing out logs that crossed the creek.

Michael made the first successful crossing, although at the end, he jumped down, or lost his balance, I couldn’t tell which.

Alice was more tentative as she tried the crossing.

Michael stood by her, coaching her all of the way.

When Alice’s teetering turned into a fall, she grabbed a near-by cedar branch on the way down, and Tarzan like, swung through the trees and landed gracefully, feet up on the ground near the creek.

Betty didn’t want to try the log crossing.

She just moved around, beneath and over logs, all of the time calling out, “Somebody help me. Somebody help me.”

"Grandmother?  Why are my hands sticky?"

Alice or Michael would move in her direction, but by the time they got there, she had already made it out of that piece of danger and was moving into another spot from which she would call out her fears to them.

At one point Michael called out, “Betty threw her gold purse in the creek and I am not going in to get it.”

Believing him, I made my way over to that part of the hill.

Yes, down in the creek was her purse.’

“What were you thinking, Betty?” I asked. ‘’Everything inside your purse is going to be wet.”

“I was falling grandmother, and I had to throw my purse.”

“Alright, I will go down and get it,” I said, knowing full well that I could never make it down that slope to the creek.

I started to make the descent anyway, and by that time Michael's hat had also dropped down there, but only beside the creek bank.

He told me that once down in the creek he thought, "Well, Betty can't make it down to the water.  I might as well throw it up."

I dried the bottom of her purse off on my shirt.

“Put it in her backpack,” he said.

When I told those little children that we would be going on an adventure, both girls grabbed their purses – Betty, her gold lame clutch bag with its chain link handle; Alice, her rattan shoulder bag with a furry small creature hanging from one of the straps, one of the gifts she chose for her birthday last month.

Betty using a slim dry stick to stabilize herself.
This was not a good idea.

I thought about how difficult it was for me to stay perpendicular in our frog hunt, and for how easy it was for them to fly through the forest with their extra equipment.

Michael called out that he had found a slug.

He changed that to a snail.

All of them had a chance to hold it and then they put it back in the stream.

Michael found some large mushrooms, now, seemingly fossilized.

At first he poke them with a stick and then he beat them trying to dissolve them back into the soil, but they just bounced around.

Occasionally Michael would call out for a rest break, and he would sit down.

By the time the other three of us caught up to him, he was ready to go. I think rest break translated to, I will sit here for a while so that the others of you can catch up.

Michael, laying o a log over a stream, his mom's hat on his stomach

I was ready to go home as soon as I entered the forest.

But the other three were far ahead of me by that time.

When it was time to go back Alice peppered me with, “Go faster, go faster.”

I finally told her going faster was a good idea for her and she should head home, find out of her second cousins could come out to play and that we would follow.

Whatever she went home and told her parents, Richard came out looking for us, wondering what the heck was going on.

What our group wanted was for him to come back into the forest again with us and help us make a path to the frog pond so that we could access it with more ease.

He wanted us to return home. I have never seen so little adventure in his soul.

We walked back down Pillings Road– me, quite happy to be on stable ground again.

Michael had carried a stick out of the forest.

He was swinging it as he walked.

“Keep that stick on the ground; it is not a cross bow,” said Richard.

There is no way that stick could stay on the ground.

It carried with it all of the energy of the forest walk.

... a picture at the end of our adventure ...
... by this time, Alice was already home and on her way back ...

Michael eventually lost it to his dad, which is a shame.

I told the kids they can’t go into that forest again without an adult.

Michael reminded me I am an adult.

Yes, I am, but I am more adult emeritus.

What they need is a younger adult – one who can keep up to them.

Still, the truth is, if they ask me, I will probably go back to walk up Campbell Spring to see if we can find some frogs.

Arta