There It Is

This is the site of one of my favorite childhood memories.

My family took a vacation every year, and we almost always camped. For a while, we owned a Pontiac Bonneville station wagon (that my parents promptly named The Lemon, and sold before we'd had it for too many years). We took our tent camping; it was canvas, and therefore heavy, but big, roomy and sturdy. You could easily stand in it, and my parents loved to tell the story of the time we slept through a wind storm that knocked down every other tent in the campground. Ours didn't budge.

Still, it was time consuming to take out, put up and break down, so when we owned The Lemon, if we were only staying somewhere for one night, we'd just sleep in the car - me in the front seat, my sister in the second seat, and my parents in the back, with the third seat folded down.

We camped at this spot on the creek when I was eight. We kids spent our time in the water while the parents did the actual work of camping, like making meals on a camp stove.

There were several families there. I don't recall numbers, but there was quite the little crowd.

Most of the other kids climbed halfway or higher on the cliff face, and jumped into the pool underneath. It was the deep spot on the creek. I'm going to guess that it was somewhere in the 10 foot depth right up against the rock, but I can't swear to it. I never went down the creek that far.

I incurred the ridicule of the other kids, and a few adults, by staying directly in the shallows. My big accomplishment was walking all the way across at one spot - the water got to be about rib cage deep for a few steps, and this was a huge, "Look at me!" accomplishment.

Yeah; nobody was impressed.

But there was NO WAY that I was jumping off of the rock into the water. Do you see the height of that cliff?

OK, here's a little scale, for perspective. Here's my van in the parking lot. The creek is just off the frame to the right.

HO -LY COW. You could have put a million dollars in that pool, and I wouldn't have jumped. I'm a wade in the shallows person.

Some adventurous big kids - probably early teens - climbed all the way to the top before jumping. Their parents nixed any repeat of that behavior. Not on grounds that made sense to me, but on the grounds that the water needed to be deeper to jump from that height.

Years later, I asked my mom where this spot was. We'd been through six states on that trip, and I couldn't remember where this campground was. "It wasn't actually a campground," Mom said, "just a little rest area." Any more, I think that they'd shoo away overnight visitors.

We were driving my son to his university when we passed this spot, and I saw it for the first time in almost 40 years. "That's it! That's the place! We camped there!" I became very excited, and insisted on stopping for photos on the drive back home. My family could not understand why, but humored me on the grounds that there's just no accounting for my eccentricities.

It was almost exactly the way I remembered it. The biggest difference was that I remembered the rock being pink, and it's actually a rusty color. In my defense, my clearest memories are of the place at sunset. Everything else almost the same.

The biggest changes were that the willows along the bank were higher, and there's now a chain link fence at the edge of the parking lot, blocking access to the cliff face, except from the water. There used to be a defined path through the willows, leading from the parking lot to the water, but it's closed up without all the foot traffic. I'll bet that someone decided that it was courting humungous lawsuits to "let" kids jump off of it.

The only unpleasant association I have with the place is the mosquitoes. I'm one of those people who smell particularly yummy to mosquitoes. They'll feast on me, even when they're avoiding other people. This was shortly before we learned that taking a daily Vitamin B-1 makes a person smell far less yummy to the little bloodsuckers. (Sincerely, it works.)

Since we were only here for one night, we slept in the car. It got so stuffy that we kids insisted on keeping the window cracked open, even though Mom wanted it closed to keep out the bugs.

Mother knows best. I woke up several times to the distinctive whine of mosquitoes buzzing near my ear. When I woke up in the morning, my mother gasped, wide eyed at my appearance. Mom is a very calm person, not given to any kind of hysterics, so I was alarmed. "What?"

Mom doesn't sugar coat things; she's good with words and can usually find a non-offensive way to say things. Sometimes, though, she just laid it on the line. "Your face looks like raw hamburger!"

Stupid mosquitoes.

Decades later, we encountered no insects. My husband laughed at me as I insisted on wading out in the water again, taking photos. "I wish I had a picture of that," he said.

I, though, now have photographs to go with my memories. I can almost see the kids flinging themselves off of the rock face, laughing.

Ah, childhood.

It's good even in the shallows.