Place Blog #6: Not quite lost.

Sometimes, things aren’t “lost” but simply overlooked. In our haste, we rush around, looking for what we assume to be big and flashy and to jump out at us with blinking lights and signs saying “HERE: THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR!” But often, we miss whatever it is we’re looking for simply by oversight: the “lost” keys in your old jacket pocket, the “lost” wallet in your dresser drawer, the “lost” drive in your life…well I guess that’s what I’m looking for.

But for me, it took a slow meandering drive through the Lost Creek watershed, with my daughter in her booster seat in the back of our Jeep, for me to find some semblance of what I’m looking for. Throughout this process of discovering Lost Creek, with the idea of finding a home, I’ve tramped up and down the watershed—mostly alone, mostly in the cold. But today it was so nice out, I brought Clara along, hoping that we could find some place to walk along the creek, skip stones (or just throw them in as she does at only 3 and a ½ years old).

From our house, we only needed to wiggle around some back-country roads for a mile before we crossed a small bridge on Sunset Road with a culvert channeling Lost Creek underneath it. There we pulled over beyond the guard rail where enough road gravel made the muddy ground a little more stable. If driving fast enough on this road, you might not even notice the creek. It’s barely more than a trickle, and its banks are choked with tangling green briar, grape vine, scrub oak, and a plethora of other low-lying shrubbery. But, I know what I’m looking for, the knot of vegetation a sign, however slight, that something more might be beneath.

We got out of the car and walked up to where the water spills out of the culvert, the only place that has some briar removed enough to walk up to the edge of the creek. Above the bridge and a few yards below this spot, the creek is no more than six feet across and probably only shin-deep at best, even now a week after a major flood event. But right below the bridge, the channeling of the waters through the culvert has dug out a plunge pool, deep enough and dark enough to hold trout beneath the ice in winter and to provide enough cover from predatory birds in the low-water summer.

“Daddy, I want to fish,” Clara declared.

Be still me heart! My daughter: a fishing nut with the same cracked shell as me. In my mind, I quickly thought about what gear we had in the car: her Disney Princess rod, left over from a sunny pond fishing trip last fall, my fly chest- and back-packs, but no fly rod. With our lack of equipment and the sun really starting to fade behind Shade Mountain to our north and west, I tried to persuade her that we ought to go home, that we’d come back another day and fish.

“No,” she said in a sweet, not demanding way, “We can fish for a little bit. It’s not too dark.”

I couldn’t say no to her enthusiasm and persistence, so I got out her rod. I attached a bobber and below that, since we didn’t have any worms for her to use, attached two weighted wet-flies that I normally would use to nymph this time of year. We walked over to the edge of the creek. A scraggly pod of briar still clung to the bank here, but I could cast out over that for Clara, and then she would reel it back in after letting it drift for a few yards. This lasted for a few casts before she was picking up road gravel that was kicked under the guard rail toward the bank and was putting handfuls of this stone in my jeans pocket.

“Ready to go home?” I asked.

“No, you keep fishing daddy.”

So there I stood, in the fading light, pink Princess rod in hand (oh yeah…did I mention that the handle lit up when you pushed the button on the reel to open the bale…) and a pre-schooler filling up my pockets with rocks. I wonder what the few cars that drove back Sunset Road were thinking when they saw our motley operation.

But honestly, I didn’t care. It was here, in the waning glow of the first really nice spring evening, my daughter with me by the bank of this artificial hole dug out by the culvert currents, that I think I might have found at least a piece of what I was overlooking. It wasn’t about a creek. As much as moving water is part of me, the creek was only part of “it.” A landscape alone cannot be a home; it has to be filled with people. It has to be shared with those you love.

So as I reeled in the Princess rod for the last time, the sunlight nearly gone, Clara asked, “Do we have to leave yet…,” and pulled her rocks out of my pockets to toss in the creek. They made a blast of tiny splashes, that we could only hear, not see, and she laughed: “I want to do some more.” Pure, simple.

Here was…is…this little girl. I’ve always told my wife that Clara is something special to me, not only because she’s my first child, but because she’s the first blood relative I’ve ever known due to fact that I was adopted. It blew my mind that very first time I held her up and sang “Blackbird” to her in the hospital, and it blew my mind now because I know that there’s more than my blood coursing through her; the same river that moves through me moves through her.