[Stage Directions: Please listen to Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 in D minor as you read this post. It is the perfect tincture of macabre and adventure.]
The other morning, in that precarious time between waking up and getting up, I read a short article about ghost streams. A very interesting read, which got me remembering Alex and I’s own personal ghost stream, Crow Creek.
Sometime in the last year or two or so (time is so slippery!), in Google-Mapsing around Idaho, I noticed a thin blue line weaving through the gray rectangles where Alex and I had grown up next-door to each other.
I have many memories of the gently skewampus rectangle on the corner of 8th and Fanning, and the nearly-abutting near-square, for these were mine and Alex’s childhood homes, respectively. The creek, Crow Creek, is totally absent from my remembrances of things past.
The Idaho Fishing Planner from Idaho Fish and Game confirmed the creek’s course, providing that blessed second witness to what could easily have been an error on Google’s part. Fish and Game further informed me that the daily bag limit for sturgeon is zero. Not because there aren’t any sturgeon in Crow Creek, necessarily, just that Catch-and-Release is the law of the land, with respect to the sturgeon which may or may not have been in my basement all along.
[Stage Directions: You’ll know you’re on the right track now if YouTube (which, we must remember, is owned by the very same Google) has auto-played directly into Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, which happens to be perfect for the resurrection ritual Google Maps signaled our initiation into near the beginning of this post.]
Crow Creek, during its pre-spectral phase of existence, had a storied life in the context of the settlement of the Idaho Falls area by European-American colonizers. In 1900, one of the West’s first municipally owned and operated hydro-electric power plants was built near present-day Boulevard Ave. and 10th St. The water that powered the plant drained post-coitally into Crow Creek, for safe passage back to the Snake River, and thereby, to the Pacific at Cape Disappointment.
From here we can transition to the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which so lovingly coagulate into an incremental autopsy of the landscapes of this, our living continent. The map of Bonneville County from 1903 shows, in amputated form, the beautiful blue of Crow Creek collecting the water from the power plant, carrying it directly into the black outline of the map segment.
By 1905, the city has grown enough to cradle Crow Creek in its concrete and 2×4 arms. You’ll notice the insidious gleam in the city’s eye as it flanks the unsuspecting, and therefore stupid, creek.
By 1921 the city had nearly accomplished its design. The sliver of Crow Creek that remained must have flopped and slurped for sustenance like a fished fish does on the bottom of a metal fishing boat.
By the time Alex and I were riding our bikes along those streets toward the Snake River, which somehow managed to survives the city’s onslaught, Crow Creek was, in our experience, dead and buried. Not until the mid-2010’s, with the restorative power of Google Maps, did the hauntings of our dreams and childhoods begin to make sense.
For, as it turns out, even dead-and-buried creeks emit powerful images into the minds of those who try to sleep upon their hidden banks.
Please stay tuned to ScholarDay.com for the upcoming adventure tale of two boys who discover a covered creek and resurrect childhood trees in the process.
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