解放军文职招聘考试The Enchantment of Creeks

 The Enchantment of Creeks

Nearly everybody has a creek in his past, a con­fiding waterway that rose in the spring of youth. A park ranger's voice softens as he talks of a boyhood creek in Louisiana   where   he   swam   and   fished.   A conservationist's eyes sparkle as he recalls building dams on Strawberry Creek in California of his youth. An Ohio woman feels suddenly at home again as she remembers catching crayfish in the creek behind her parent's house.

My creek wound between Grandfather's apricot or­chard and a neighbor's hillside pasture. Its banks were shaded by cottonwoods and redwood trees and a thick tangle of blackberries and wild grapevines. On hot summer days the quiet water flowed clear and cold over gravel bars where I fished for trout.

Nothing historic ever happens in these recollected creeks. But their persistence in memory suggests that creeks are bigger than they seem, more a part of our hearts and minds than mighty rivers.

Creek time is measured in the lives of strange creatures in sand-flecked caddis worms under the rocks, sudden gossamer clouds of mayflies in the after­noon, or minnows darting like slivers of inspiration into the dimness of creek fate. Mysteries float in creeks' rif­fles, crawl over their pebbled bottoms and slink under the roots of trees.

While rivers are heavy with sophistication and sediment, creeks are clear, innocent, boisterous, full of dream and promise. A child can wade across them without a parent's cautions. You can go it alone, jig for crayfish, swing from ropes along the bank. Greeks be­long to childhood, drawing you into the wider world, teaching you the curve of the earth.

Above all, a creek offers the mind a chance to penetrate the alien universe of water, of tadpoles and trouts. What drifts in creek water is the possibility of other worlds inside and above our own. Poet Robert Frost wrote: " It flows between us, over us, and with us. And it is time, strenghth, tone, light, life, and love. "