Following A Stream

Thoughts on Wonder and Childhood (plus a small update)

Growing up there was a small creek in our backyard. When the rains were gone in spring and the storms were far away, grasses popped up in the understory of redwood, bay, and oak along the stream. We’d often walk down to the water  to see what was going on down there. In the slowing rush of the creek during summer, we’d look for tadpoles and little fish in the waters cut off from the rest of the stream. Sometimes we’d play in the muddy bits of sand at a bank and find a leech on ourselves and start running for the house like we were some those kids in Stand By Me. We made movies with Beanie Babies in the creek, threw  bricks at sticks floating in the water, ran away from skunks and rushing deer in the creek. It was one lone suburban stream for us to play in. And maybe it was an urge I had to return to that feeling of joy and excitement and discovery that drove me the other week, in the middle of a rainstorm, to follow a stream down through a valley.

I didn’t know any creeks in the East Bay so I looked it up on my phone, found one in Redwood Regional Park and drove out. As I got on the highway the rain stopped and the sun started to look through openings in the clouds. I got to the trailhead and found some more cars than I expected in the parking lot. I headed down a fire road into the little valley where the stream was supposed to be. 

As I walked, the light kept shifting in and out of the clouds, making me stop to stare at the edge of moss on trees or the rushing tiny muddy water beside the trail. Eventually I made it down to the redwoods, tall, old, spread out. The light creeping through only making the stillness of the shadows, the presence of the little stream all the more clear. I was in awe of the dripping forest and how it felt so hidden despite its closeness to the city. 

At one point along the trail the muddy stream appeared green, almost serpentine and I so badly wanted to capture the color of it. I hopped over a small fence, thinking to take a shot of it up close. But I couldn’t find the color in the camera. It just couldn’t appear. Then, behind me, as I was getting back over the fence again, I saw a couple hurriedly walking their dog toward me, determined it seemed to give their big pup a good power walk. And in that moment I suddenly became embarrassed. I had, for the past hour and a half, been wandering, staring, and exploring this new place in the same way I used to run around the creek with my siblings. I was walking with a sense of play, of curiosity, childishly in awe of everything I was seeing around me. And running into those people reminded me of my age, nearing thirty, and how we shouldn’t be walking around like that. We’re adults now — no time for wonder. And how sad it would be to think that, hold onto that feeling, to lose the sense of wonder, the sense of childhood. 

To lose it seems to me is to lose the recognition of how truly wild and incomprehensible it is to be a person, a consciousness, alive at all. You don’t need to leave the city to find this wonder either. Just look at the ground for trash and you’ll be certain to find something unexpected, beautiful even (my sibling finds amazing trash all the time and makes art out of it).

As my siblings and I got older, we found other ways to play in the creek. Years ago, when my brother came home for a summer, he bought a bunch of house paint and walked it downstream to a tunnel and started to paint. Eventually we all joined in, Wyatt inviting his homies, all of us working on our little murals, hidden from the street, still able to explore.

It seems that we can’t really stop playing in the creek. Wyatt is an illustrator now, Dyll is an artist and musician, Cass is a painter and illustrator. We all make shit. We all still seem to wonder, now just reaching closer to the end of our societally prescribed youth, yet still child like in the important ways, and still growing.

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Just wanted to share this review in Broke-Ass Stuart I had the joy of writing about jane galerie’s most recent show Exposed to all the ruins now up for only two more days in Chinatown! Go see it if you have the chance!