Short Creek Valley

I've often said that I grew up in a boyhood's perfect paradise and here's a little bit of evidence. If paradise has a water source, Short Creek is a worthy one with water clear as a summer breeze after rain, potable, in the upper valley. I often thought when I was young that Short Creek was an ironic name, my expeditions ran deep into the hills but never reached the source. Short Creek was long in life's lessons and longer yet in memories. In age we all say things shrink. The childhood farm is no longer huge, the creek was truly not so long, though still I would not call it short for it was formidable. Perhaps that was the first lesson, living in a confusing world so soon to be a shrinking village - the world is full of contradiction. I fished Short Creek from its mouth at the muddy Yazoo and well into the hills. Catfish lurked there and alligator gar, sunfish, bass, soft-shell and green turtles and wayward wood duck strays that overflew the nearby Horseshoe Lake. It was easy to imagine then the native ancestry of the land - the Cherokee and Choctaw, the ancient Yazoo tribesman standing in a dugout made of cypress as he polled his way across the flat land delta strip before the hills turned bayou to rapids. Then, abundant deer, bear and turkey roamed the land. In hills above the valley, the Indians made their camps and shards and arrow heads were turned behind our plows and taught that treasure, that life itself, comes from the earth and that man returns to it. That was the second lesson. The third lesson was about wonder and joy and faith in intuition. The creek was a playground in my childhood time: a place for skipping rocks, a place to camp, to swim, to split a first beer with a buddy, a place of muddy banks to form a water slide, a diving platform for the fool hardy, sand beaches that rival Cancun, a place to spy on skinny dippers and find what girls were all about, a holy balm to consecrate a friendship. Yes, Short Creek was a playground but also a place of higher learning: a place to explore the crux of living, to wonder and to find what was, what is, and what was yet to be.