Lessons From a Backyard Creek - Jaden Southern

In the backyard of the house I grew up in, somewhat out of place in the cookie cutter suburb, a grass covered hill slopes steeply to the edge of a small creek. It’s bound on the closer side by a rotting pile of leaf litter. On the far side sits a dense thicket of bushes and fallen branches. In the creek, a stream flows part of the year, carrying with it twigs and old leaves. If you follow the streambed downstream, you will pass through an open swath of bright green grass stretching behind several neighbor’s homes. In the middle is an old swing made for two carved from wood and crawling with vines like something out of a fairytale. Past the swing, a grove of pines cover the ground in red needles. The ground is squishy when you step on it, a poor man’s trampoline. At the end of the block, the water flows behind a fence where I could never follow. Eventually, it feeds into Coldwater Creek which runs all through the county. Upstream, just beyond the property line of my old house, is the storm drain that feeds it each year.

The city I grew up in is called Florissant, a semi-rural suburbia in St. Louis County, Missouri. St. Louis is tucked neatly into the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the first and second longest rivers in North America. The water flows strongly in the Missouri, white and foamy, only to meet up with the broad and muddy Mississippi. Together, the two rivers travel through and along 16 states, catching water from 32 along the way, making them invaluable to millions of people for water, transportation, and recreation. At the park next to the middle school I went to, you can witness the rising and falling tides of the Missouri. Next to a concrete parking lot, a sparse stand of trees separates visitors from the water. If you’re brave, you might walk down the beige boat ramp to the water’s edge, just out of reach of the force of the river. About a mile downstream, Coldwater Creek feeds into the Missouri. Thus, on a 1200 mile journey, the water that passes through the creek in my old backyard eventually empties into the Gulf of Mexico before finding its way to the open ocean.

It’s hard to imagine that tiny trickle of water eventually becoming one of the most important rivers in the country. That something so small might become something so big with just a bit of time and enough of the right connections. 

Around 6th grade, connection was rather elusive to me, but that tiny creek was one of my best friends. I struggled to keep up with the rapidly developing social expectations of middle schoolers. I felt constant pressure to have the right clothes, sit with the right people at lunch, leave the right comments on the right social media posts. Maybe out of love for the colorful flowers, maybe to avoid my peers, I started to get to know the creeping vines and clover mats of my backyard creek. 

At one section, a maple tree had fallen over the water, connecting the 10 foot gap between the two sides. The knotted bark was a little over a foot wide and still sturdy enough to hold the weight of a curious preteen. I would often race across it to the dense tangle of branches and vines on the other side. Other times, I would venture down to the streambed. Careful to keep my shoes out of the mud, I would balance on large cobbles that lined the bottom, shiny smooth on top from years of being worn down by the water. Far away from the din of the expectations at school, I found solace in the gurgle of water gently making its way over rocks. 

As spring descended, the puddles of water at the bottom of the creek drank the rain eagerly. The water trickled along the cobbles carrying the musty scent of leaves disturbed for the first time in months. The leaves, dead and brown, were already beginning their journey of decomposition. Too soft and waterlogged to crunch underfoot anymore, they traveled quietly to the water’s end. I would watch the trickle grow stronger, hiding the cobbles underneath from view and beginning to carry broken twigs and old wrappers thrown in upstream. My favorite part was hearing the water change. As the current grew fuller, a trickle became a stream, a whisper turned to a roar loud enough to help drown out the constantly racing thoughts in my head.

I became protective over my aquatic haven. It was a private escape from crowded halls and looming text messages. After school, I would tell my mom I was leaving to hang out with friends. Instead, I would sneak off to follow the stream to the far side, serenely tracing behind the neighbor’s houses. Near the pine grove was an actual bridge, still made of wood, but chopped and carved, freed from bark and bruises. The bridge was old and marked by decades of rain and the rest of the elements, but far more flat and stable than a tree trunk. I often wondered who put it there. Did they still live in one of these houses? Did they cross it every so often and admire their handiwork? Or was the bridge here before the suburb, a remnant from half a century ago, its creator pushed away by urban development? What reason did they have to get to the other side? On hot and sticky summer days, I would sit in the middle of the bridge, legs dangling off the side, and stare down at my purple laced-Converse, content with my curiosity and grateful whoever made it had some reason to connect this section of the stream. 

On the branches hanging over the water, I would hunt for stickbugs and leaf bugs, testing myself against their clever camouflage. Sometimes, I’d compare the water between the upstream and downstream sides, noticing how the strength changed and wondering what might have caused it. At school, I was riddled with what I would later come to know as anxiety, terrified of having the wrong interest or reaction, but, by the creek, I was all curiosity and questions. Rivers follow paths carved out over centuries of running over the same spot over and over again, but in 1881, a major flood caused a section of the Mississippi to change course, cutting off the small Illinois town of Kaskaskia from the rest of the state. Today, it is only accessible from Missouri. Every failed social interaction carved my anxiety deeper, only increasing the worry I felt at the next one, but the creek kept a part of me separate from my restless ways of navigating the world. There was no right or wrong. Just the sound of water following a path shamelessly.

As I grew older, like the rivers, I grew stronger as well. While the anxiety didn’t go away, it became quieter, more of a whisper than a shout. Hours spent outside by the water were replaced by windows-down car rides with high school best friends. Still, every now and then, I found my way back to the comfort of the softly trickling water and trailing vines, and, for a brief moment in time, I decided to let someone in on my leafy secret. 

The summer after sophomore year of high school, desperate to impress, I introduced my backyard creek to a girl I’d become close with during the school year. One hot summer day, the two of us sat atop the storm drain, our laughter echoing in a hidden cove we’d found. The ground we sat on was just upstream of my house. Layers of soil and grass separated us from the concrete tunnel below. Where we sat, we were just barely guarded from passing cars by overgrown bushes and half fallen branches. In front of and behind us were stands of tall green trees. The air was humid and our skin was sticky with sweat. At this time of summer, everywhere you looked was bright green, a mix of emerald, shamrock, and lime densely packed together. Bushes pushed up to our sides, and the canopy high above tinted everything as the light scattered through its leaves.

Away from the road, a path snaked behind the neighbor’s yards. But here, in a 10 square foot patch of grass, we were alone. Far from prying, judgemental eyes. Far from “what if someone sees us?” and “what if we get caught?”. Every so often, a breeze would blow, calming the heat on our sweaty skin and pushing the grass sideways for a moment. The grass underneath us was cool and soft, a welcome reprieve. Our biggest worry were the dozens of ravenous mosquitoes, but we offered our skin like sacrifices for our time spent together. 

Time passed slowly. We picked at the small white flowers dotting the ground around our feet. Pinpricks of bright against dark. I didn’t know the name of the flower, but, at that time, wrote it off as a weed. Even though they were quite beautiful, they didn’t seem to belong. 

The collection of flowers in front of us grew until one of us paused. I can’t remember who first. We stopped, to look at each other or breathe, it’s hard to say which. The only proof of life was the blades of grass bending in the wind, until slowly, gently, she set one of the flowers in my hair. It was short then, my hair, but round and full. She sat back, admiring her work. I watched as the waves of an idea spread across her face, like water in the sluggish Mississippi. She started to set in my hair as many flowers as she could fit. My curls held many while others swiftly fell back to the soil from which they came. With each stem, our giggles turned into laughter, the sound adding to the choir of wind, insects, and water around us. I figured this must be love. Flowers and grass and mosquitoes and laughter.

Like all days, the day eventually ended. Bright turned to dark as we left our hidden cove and the flowers in my hair felt more like weeds again as shame, an eerily similar feeling to anxiety, re-entered my body. Of course, the plants we call weeds have no say in their coming or going. They are often brought on accident from far away places, taking up space that could go to native plant life. They are only passengers, living the only way they know how. Still, we call them weeds, and pull them out, and complain that they are ruining our gardens. 

Not every weed is invasive. Many coexist peacefully with the native flora and fauna, finding their new place in the way of things. While I started to find places I fit in high school, I still never felt the same as everyone else. I was figuring out what it meant to be queer in a place where “gay” could be used to describe anything from bad shoes to an uninteresting lesson. Like the weeds I picked, to those who didn’t understand, I was a threat. I found peace in better understanding who I was, but I was also judged and ridiculed for it. I found my identity bittersweet, another example of my inability to belong, but it also meant I drew attention, like the small white flowers in my hair.

She and I were together for 3 years. She never told her parents about us. She was raised religious and terrified of how they might react. Terrified she might ruin a family, like a rogue species ruins an ecosystem. But she loved me anyway. She loved the only way she knew how. With her, the backyard was sacred, our personal church. We watched the creek flow. We told stories about the house and kids we would have one day. We imagined that small things could, one day, be big. 

When I was a kid, before ideas of anxiety and shame grew roots in my head, the backyard was a jungle. The dense stand of trees that separated our backyard from the neighbor’s was impossible to see through and even harder to traverse, and every journey there was an adventure. At five years old, I wasn’t allowed to play in the back without my older siblings. Reluctantly, they’d let me join in on their exploits, half out of familial obligation and half not wanting me to complain to our mom. In the summer, we would play by the creek.

“Stay away from the edge”, they’d yell at me as I stumbled to keep up.

My sister was eight and my brother 15, our rugged leader. I listened in admiration as they made up stories about fallen trees, imagined the treehouses they would build, and found ways to hide scraped knees from our parents. Our mom would watch us from the top of the hill, ready for us to bring home some stick or rock that we just had to show her. 

“Stop being scary,” my brother yelled at me from the other side.

Between us was the fallen tree trunk connecting the two sides of the stream. A bridge, if one was brave enough. The tree, much too big for me to even wrap my arms around, once stood tall. It was likely struck down by lightning in a bad storm, or maybe it fell over from the weight of itself, tired of carrying all who came to rest in its branches. But even then, it still wasn’t free from its endless task of carrying things as it finished bracing the weight of my brother and sister crossing.

“What if I fall?” I shouted back, my young voice high and tinny.

“Just come on!” my brother responded, irritated with my hesitation.

Desperate to show strength, I stepped on the makeshift bridge, legs trembling in my pink plaid shorts which were bright and conspicuous against the dirty brown of the trunk. I took a deep breath and stepped on the edge, careful not to look down. I slowly began to pick my way across, nothing around to steady myself on but the wind. Six feet below, the water in the creek trickled softly. It flowed in disjointed sections, not quite a stream yet, the exposed mud thick and unforgiving. I stood above it, not quite a person yet.

In my head, the mud was quicksand, ready to swallow me alive. The tree trunk, an old rope bridge ready to snap at the smallest miscalculation of movement. Fear overtook me, as it often did then. I stumbled. And, with nothing to grab a hold of, I was falling through air. Falling with nothing but the mud underneath to catch me. I hit the ground with a loud squish, the shiny wet dirt harder than I expected. My siblings were immediately hit with the regret of bringing me there. I imagine they heard in their heads the echo of my mom’s voice telling them to ‘look after your sister’. They carried me, muddy and crying, up the hill and through the plastic white fence that kept our dog in. Grudgingly, they presented me to my mom amidst a chorus of “it wasn’t my fault”s. I had ruined my good shoes.

As a kid, I never thought much of mud or dirt. It was something to clean up and wash off and not track into the house. While mostly impossible to see with the naked eye, soil is estimated to hold around half of all life. Together, like the union of millions of tiny streams, microscopic bugs boast the most biodiverse habitat on Earth. As a youngest sibling, it was easy to feel overshadowed, never old enough or big enough to keep up. I was constantly in trouble for not doing the smart thing. As we lose many types of life to climate change and trees being cut down, we usually only hear about the species we can easily see. We rarely think much of the small things. Maybe, a fall into the mud is something like falling into the embrace of billions of beings that know something of what it’s like to be small. 

The last time I saw the house was during winter break of my second year of college. I was only just beginning to learn how to see the more than human world. I didn’t yet know the names of the trees in my backyard, or why the water ran the way it did, or if the big tree would ever fall. I knew helicopter seeds, mosquitoes, white flowers, and when the leaves turned colors. About a month before moving out, I learned that Coldwater Creek, and likely many of its tributaries, had been contaminated by nuclear waste from the 1940s. For decades, the waste was spread for miles by wind and rain. Only in 2024, had cleanup of the area begun. It is expected to be completed in 2038. While the immense networks of rivers connect faraway places, they also carry remnants of messy histories. I imagine the rivers that make me will also forever carry particles of shame and anxiety in their currents, but they will also carry me to faraway places.

Looking back, it’s easy to see a single place as many. Who we are at any given point colors our outlook which, in return, colors the attitude of a place. This determines what it gives and what we take from it. If we look beyond ourselves, we might even see what that place was before we encountered it and what it will be after we are gone. Years can pass in seconds in the memory. Hours of time condense into a single snapshot of feeling: fear, love, loneliness, belonging, loss. The river always starts somewhere, but it never really ends. It just keeps moving, becoming something bigger than it ever could have imagined.