A Woodland Brook
About a mile inland from the coast of Maine, in deep summer when the grass dries out and the air heavies with sweltering heat, there is a quiet pocket of the woods that shelters a small brook. The brook is coarse and bubbly, and it plays in shallow pools and tumbles over rocks, under a filtering shadow of leaves and evergreen trees. The water is clear and sweetly cold, and it ripples with the disappearing tracks of the water bugs that skid across its surface in the way that ice skaters do when the ponds freeze over. Mossy banks meet the water’s edge, which is occasionally disturbed by the quick round splashes of small toads that dive to hide beneath the surface before you ever see them. The air here is more delicately warm than hot, and it is filled with the sticky scent of pine and greenery. It swells with the distant hum of cicadas and the chipper of the oven birds rising and falling, and I did not yet know that all these things would define the summertimes of my youth.
Winding deep into the woods, the brook is of unknown origin, but in my young mind it most likely trails to some overgrown kingdom of fairies and forest creatures. My brothers and sisters and I would spend entire days at the brook, trooping through the woods while singing and calling out like amateur pirates, loudly parading without self-consciousness in the way that only young children can.
We tried to sail down it in buckets like Niagara Falls (except this drop-off was a mere few inches), and then attempted to river-raft across the surface in red plastic winter sleds that had sunbleached to faded coral pink. When those efforts failed, we pilfered scrapwood from our father’s woodshop and constructed fleets of small wooden boats, transferring our dreams of voyage onto their tiny imaginary passengers.
One summer, my older brother decided that a dam should be built to trap more water and deepen the largest wading pool. He appointed himself captain of the project and we diligently followed orders, determinedly stacking the rocks that he carefully selected and puzzled together, diligently cementing the gaps between them with muddy sticks and sodden leaves. After a while, the brook began to swell with water and grew high enough to tempt us into swimming there. We carted our swim goggles and beach balls down to the brook and spent the hot afternoon gleefully splashing each other in the lovely icy water. We might have spent the whole summer that way, except that when the dam was discovered by our father, he ordered us to destroy it. We took it apart slowly and dejectedly, watching the water slide down like a draining bathtub and slip away through the rocks.
It has been many years since that brook was the center of our young lives, and I see now that the powerful river, once so ancient and essential, is nothing more than the smallest of brooks running under the road near our old house. There is now a complex built behind the opposite bank, and the trees on that side have been felled and devoured, leaving a strange blank and vulnerable space full of harsh sunlight where there was once a safe and peaceful shadow. Those who cut down the trees would not have seen the brook as more than a muddy and miniscule rill, if they noticed it at all. There was no way for them to know that it was once grand, alive, and overflowing with the shouts of laughter and children’s voices. They would never know that this place is sacred for those children, all those years ago, testing how far our adventures could take us.
As I imagine it, the brook still exists as it once was, in a place that cannot be touched or disturbed. In my mind I visit it and tend to it the way that a gardener takes care to water the flowers. I rebuild the trees, and with the patterns of their leaves, I patch the sky back together. In my imagination I let the cold water pool higher and higher and I make the brook secret again. I take care of this place because it took care of me, and it gave me the gift of imagination. I do this because there are no trees left to remember the axe that forgets. The trees forget but I remember.