It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and no chance of going back to sleep. I turn the coffee pot on and silently walk through the dimly lit kitchen. I listen as the sound of streaming liquid hits the bottom of the paper coffee cup. The smell of coffee fills the air. I pick up my phone and thumb through a few text messages that arrived late evening after I had called it a day. Today’s schedule is light, there is not much to review so my mind wonders as I sit after retrieving my coffee.
The circle of thoughts running through my mind have come to rest at a place of my youth. A place in time where you are experiencing the space just beyond parental supervision and the only women in your life are family.
It’s summertime and I am at the creek with my friends. We started the morning looking to out do one another fishing however the tide going the wrong way and past experience signaled it would be a bust. There we were, the seven of us equally disappointed, just staring at the water silent. The question of what to do breaks the silence and a couple ideas are discussed before settling on hide and seek in the creek.
The creek had a narrow channel and long shallows to the banks. The bottom of which was more silt than mud. A kid could literally be neck deep in a foot of water. That coupled with lilly pads reaching nearly two feet into the air made it easy to conceal oneself. It was going to be great!
The seekers would use an old wooden row boat “borrowed” from a neighboring dock to scour the Lilly pads for those hiding. The goal, make your way into the creek, cross the channel and seek safety in the yard behind a church on the other side. The seekers patrolled the Lilly pads and channel looking to capture those making their way across the creek. Once spotted and identified you had to surrender and were brought aboard the boat.
There was a small peninsula into the creek, that once supported a railroad crossing, separating the dock and the place where those hiding would enter the water. Prior to entering the water we would switch shirts and hats trying to make identifying more difficult in the event you happen to be spotted. It wasn’t cheating, just a small advantage that bought a little more time in the water. We gave very little thought to possible hazards such as snapping turtles, leeches or any of the many things that probably could have made us ill. When the day was done each of us had a turn in the boat seeking and while a couple of us made it to safety it didn’t happen more than once. Probably could have done something really useful with those hours but it wouldn’t have been near as much fun.
