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A Fred Miller vintage column from February 1992
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It was a lovely springlike Saturday.
"Have any plans for today?" Honey asked as the morning dawned warm and bright.
I said I had hoped to work on the garage this weekend, but the matter of the creek was more pressing. You see, we didn't have one because I got rid of it, but I found we needed one.
"Let's go dig a new creek," I told Little Worshrag.
"Okay," he said without question. I could have said, "Let's go jump off a bridge," and he would have said, "Okay." Kids are so compliant at age 3.
I found my rubber boots and boots for Worsh, too, and out we went. I put a light jacket on the boy and a work vest and ballcap on me.
During the drought of last summer I had our creek removed. It was three feet deep and filled with briars, and inconveniently ran right through the middle of our yard. When Bill the Dirt Man came to excavate for our new garage, I told him to use the extra dirt to fill in the creek. I said I was tired of a creek and didn't want one anymore. All it did was lose baseballs and shelter mosquitoes.
Because of an extended drought we got along without one for half a year.
Then one morning a couple of weeks ago, after a long rainy spell, I looked out to see water flowing across our landscaped yard, wide as the Missouri.
Living up here at the end of our holler I am my own contractor, my own road crew, my own landscape architect, my own whatever. This day called for me to be my own civil engineer. I found a long-handled shovel and my favorite mattock, and set about spading a narrow channel the length of the yard, starting from the top, where the old channel ended abruptly as it came out of the woods.
The old channel at that spot was two feet deep and half again as wide. Effectively dammed by the fill at the upstream end of the yard, it had become a Worshrag-sized pond.
"Look Daddy, 'ater," Worsh said excitedly, splashing in it with a stick.
I moved what had been a one-board bridge to the lower end of Lake Worshrag. The boy laid down on it to better diddle in the water.
With Worshrag occupied, I pressed on with my civil engineering. As I cut a narrow channel through the wet clay, muddy water flowed to the head of my mattock, impatient to try out the new creek.
In most places I took the water where it already wanted to go. In others, to keep it more or less straight and on the far side of the yard, I cut through higher ground and filled low spots. It was the same process employed to dig for the Erie Canal, without the locks.
Worshrag sloshed up to me. "Socks wet, Daddy. Changey mine socks," he said. He had stepped in the deep spot and was wet to the crotch.
Honey meanwhile was having fun pulling the winter's leaves off her perennial flower beds. On the way to get dry clothes, Worsh and I stopped to see her. Red hair pulled back in practical fashion, working with rake and trowel, knees muddy and back already aching, she, too, was having a wonderful time.
With my new creek cut and flowing like a silver thread across our yard, I found I had plenty of afternoon left. I realized neither of the older children had ventured out of the house.
"When I was a kid I was outside all the time," I griped to Honey. "How can they resist coming out on a day like this? Maybe if we forbade them from coming outside, they would want to."
"Don't bet on it," my wife said.
"Shark! Seed! Get your work clothes on. We're going to plant grapes," I commanded.
They complained, but they came.