Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [48]
As I walk to the office the sun is warm but the wind is cold. This seasonal contrast always evokes memories of my friend Ricky. A neighbor kid who began hanging around our farm one spring when I was five or six years old, Ricky was a dark-eyed boy of about twelve who didn’t seem to have friends his own age. At first, Mom says, that worried her. But Ricky and I struck up a fast friendship, aided by the fact that by country standards Ricky lived right around the corner: two flat miles from his driveway to mine. And blacktop all the way. Nothin’ at all for a boy on a bike.
Not forty yards from Ricky’s mailbox, a pair of corrugated culverts punched north-south through the east-west berm of Beaver Creek Road, carrying Beaver Creek itself beneath it. Two steel tubes and a middling stream might not sound like much, but as far as I was concerned, Ricky was the luckiest boy in the world. My father’s farm was all swamp and flatland. This left me easily bewitched by moving water. Water that flowed—that didn’t just seep, or sit still and fester up mosquitoes—gave me Huck Finn fevers. Those first warm days coming out of winter, my siblings kept our ears cocked for the sound of trickling water. Then we’d track the trickle down and do what we could to speed the flow—kicking snow into the channel, where it melted even as it floated, or widening the channel by stomping the overhanging edges of ice, which snapped beneath our boots with a satisfying crunch. When a true thaw came, rivulets broke loose everywhere, and we spent hours gouging channels from one puddle to the next, delighting in how the dirt crumbled into the clear water, spinning mud clouds downstream to form cream-in-coffee eddies. When the sediment swept clear and again the water ran transparent, miniature rapids sparkled in the sun. If we churned the puddles to mud with our boots beforehand, the drawdown left mocha-foam striations along the shoreline. It seems the urge to control the flow of water is innate—rare is the child not born prequalified for the Army Corps of Engineers. Workable parallels are found in the urge to shovel square corners into freshly fallen snow. A man on a local radio show classifies the snow-handling fetish as a form of “space management.” This is apt, but I propose freelance hydrology as a subcategory.
The water often melted faster than it could dissipate. The low spot in the middle of last year’s cornfield became a pond, complete with paddling ducks; a dip in the road became a flat stretch of water hazard—a mirage that wasn’t a mirage; over where the Keysey Swamp drained, the culverts submerged leaving no trace but a whirlpool that spun narrower and narrower until the gabbling swirl sucked shut and left the swamp water to rise in silence above the hummocks and muskrat houses to the very shoulder of Five Mile Road and sometimes across it so bullfrogs might laze unmolested above the centerline. Children love the idea of transformation and alternate worlds, and the delayed spring runoff transformed our landscape as completely as any fairy-tale Merlin. Once I sat very still against a white pine and watched as an early-returning mallard couple paddled within six feet of me on what in dry times was a deer trail. I was transfixed by the drake’s iridescent head, so close I could see the wet shine of his eyeball. One sodden spring when I was older, the road flooded by Oscar Knipfer’s place and we took the canoe over. We paddled back and forth from one blacktop shore to the other, giddy with the anomaly of it. Every summer we canoed the Red Cedar River, but for some reason it was twice as exciting to paddle above the roadway, as if we had been gifted with a magical boat.
One surreal spring day my brother John spotted a northern pike