Chapter 4: The Mouth

      "Want to follow the creek to it's mouth?" I whisper to Claire as she stirs under my summer-weight down comforter. 

"Sleep," is all she moans, turning away from the muted orange of sunrise streaming in from the doorway.

"See you in a few," I assure her as I turn back to the main room of the tiny cabin I'm renting outside of Lambertville. 

"Have a good hike," she sighs as the bedroom door clicks lightly shut and I pull on my cargo shorts.

     Waterways have always called me to follow. As a late teenager home on spring break from college in Virginia, I'd led two of my nephews on a trek up the Middle Brook into the Watchung Mountains of central New Jersey. It would fulfill several of their Boy Scout badges while satisfying my desire to see the source of my childhood playground in the creek. We splashed under the Route 22 bridge, cut past GAF dye pools, and climbed the back path to an overlook called Chimney Rock. From out on the monolith we could just see the smaller branch cutting east between First and Second Watchung. After some serious consultation over PB&J and Kool-Aid, we determined to follow the larger fork that came from the north through a gap in the second ridge. 

     A narrow dirt track, skirting around a reservoir that filled most of the gap, crossed a series of tiny trickles coming down from the hillsides. We went all the way around the lake and only found more streamlets, finally deciding on the most northerly one since that was the direction of the pass. When that rivulet divided into smaller runnels we finally realized the fallacy of there being a single source. 

     Now, after years away from New Jersey for college and medical school, I was back and ready to chase down the second half of that aqueous calling - to follow a waterway to it's inevitable mouth.

     "How did it go?" greets Claire with a tall glass of iced coffee when I return two hours later all scratched and sweaty in the full sun of mid-summer. 

"Rocktown Creek spills into the Delaware through a concrete pipe," I sigh kicking off muddy hiking shoes outside the cabin door.

"That's ridiculous," she commiserates echoing my own disappointment. "Why couldn't they let it flow naturally?"

"I know, and I got stung in the leg as I ducked under the walk bridge down below. It wasn't bad at first, but now it's going numb."

"I don't see a stinger," she declares placing the icy glass against my right knee, "but there are two red spots right below those streaks going up your leg." 

"Must have been stung twice," I conjecture with a sigh.

     "Show me where it happened!" she exclaims after a few minutes of cool relief.

We stand on the little bridge and scan the bank for a wasp nest.

"There it is!" she gasps pointing at a large flat rock overhanging the water enough to barely conceal the tawny snout of what we now know will be a triangular head.

Chapter 3: Snake Boots

     "Hey Mark, why did the equipment list say 'mid-calf leather boots'?" I ask my burly research partner after picking him up at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania turnpike.

"I don't really know," the curly-haired sophomore shrugs with a tilt of his head toward the backseat of my sky blue Datsun 210. "I'm just bringing my old high-top hikers." 

"Yeah, my construction boots will have to do."

     We were headed west to our research site on the Wilcox Playa at the dead center of the Mojave Desert. Mark was an upcoming linebacker on the college team that I had been tailback for the year before. We'd been hired by our entomology professor as summer field assistants for a project to map tiger beetle populations on a unique salt flat surrounded by five mountain ranges in southeast Arizona - Chiracahuas, Pinalenos, Dragoons, Little Dragoons, Dos Cabezas. The ancient internal drainage system hosted diverse and unique habitats and insect populations. This historic Salton Sea is also infamous for its venomous snakes - the Arizona coral snake, the western diamondback, and the particularly deadly and quick-to-strike Mojave rattlesnake. 

     Our job entailed beetle population surveys at dawn and dusk before and after the monsoons awakened life in the region sometime between late June and September. In the middle of each day, when temperatures reached above a hundred, we had a working siesta in our cheap hotel shared mostly with migrant workers up from nearby Mexico for the onion harvest. Dr. Barry Knisley, Mark, and I took turns cooking while the so-called sous-chefs caught up on field notes, letters home, or sleep. 

     Missing from our research assistant job description was a side gig for the college biology department specimen collection. Driving at morning magic hour to one of six research sites scattered around the Playa, we were the first to find any cold-blooded animals struck as they attempted to soak up heat from the blacktop in the cool night of the high desert. We took turns jumping out and running back to bag the road kill in a burlap sack. 

     "I got it," Mark calls from the backseat as Barry pulls over just past a particularly long snake apparently crushed along the broken yellow stripes of a passing line.

"My God, that's the fattest Mojave I've ever seen," exclaims Barry, a veteran of four previous summers here.

     I lean forward to watch in the side mirror and see Mark reach down and leap back as the green-tinged serpent springs into the air and strikes at his neck.

“Did it get you?” Barry screams as we both scramble back.

“Just missed,” laughs Mark as he clamps it behind the spatulate head and stuffs it's brown-checked body into the sack. “Must have been a last reflex.”

“Snake boots wouldn’t have saved you!” declares Barry shaking his head as he gets back behind the wheel.

Chapter 2: Under The Tree

      "We're going downstream," broods my sister Kathy when we arrive at the Middle Brook to find two neighborhood guys fishing in our dog Buff's favorite swimming hole. 

"Do we have to?" I fret since I've never been outside our preferred stretch of the stream babbling down from the Chimney Rock gap in the Watchung Mountains. 

"It's just the Millers and the Fords," she soothes sensing my seven-year-old worry about the kids that claim the brook closest to their part of the Downs Manor subdivision. 

     It was the the first warm day of spring in 1965. Television was still only local channels in black and white, radio just AM pop stations, so kids spent much of their time outside. We played games of kickball or SPUD on the blacktop or wandered the verdant woods along the creek that forms the western border of Bound Brook, New Jersey.  

     The Middle Brook was rerouted, channelized, and diked following a devastating flood from an atmospheric river in tropical storm Doria in 1971. Before then the stream meandered around the loop of Hanken Road and ran right beside Tea Street for the rest of it's course. A bend at the south end of the hank created a deep hole, and that's where twelve-year-old Kathy was heading so our beagle could do his favorite thing, diving to retrieve rocks.

     "It's Christmas," I laugh running toward a brittle tree lying beside the pool where Buff is already swimming.

"Whoa mister!" commands my lithe sister grabbing my shoulder as a nearly invisible snake slides into the pool from beneath the copper-colored conifer. 

"It's going for Buff," I cry as it undulates across the dark water right behind our beloved tricolor.

"Nah, just getting away from a scary little boy."

     Oblivious to the commotion, Buff paddles past a protruding branch and it snags the loop of his choke collar. 

"Come on Buffy, you can do it, you can do it," cheers Kathy as the determined little hound paddles in place and the chain tightens around his neck.

"Come on Buffy, you can do it, you can do it," I cry out as he starts to splutter. 

"Come on Buffy, you can do it, you can do it," we scream together as his head goes under and Kathy steps into the cold water, her bell-bottom jeans suddenly darkening up to the knees. 

She's in up to her thighs and about to dive when our precious mutt pops up coughing and swims right across as if nothing had happened. 

     "Now we know the limitations of the doggy paddle," Kathy muses as we head back upstream between the greening sycamores lining the banks of the Middle Brook. "Once you start you can only go forward."

     

Chapter 1: Taking The Leap

    

     "Let's jump into this leaf pile!" enthuses six-year-old Karla as we're walking to LaMonte School. 

"Un-un," I whisper shaking my head no as she takes two steps and leaps off the Thompson Avenue curb into a raked stack of reds, yellows, and browns.

"Come on, it's fun," she laughs, tossing up dried leaves that flutter down around her. "On your mark, get set...."

"Go!" I shout unable to resist her starting line command.

A muffled squeak echoes up from the fronds under my feet and we both freeze.

     "Oh no, maybe it's a cat!" she cries scooping away leaves from around my legs. 

"Fuck," I moan mimicking my father and joining her frantic raking as the brittle bracts settle right back down around my PF Flyers.

"We'd better go," she cautions trying to pull me away from the pile. "You can't be late to kindergarten." 

"No!" I resist because I really, really, really want a cat.

"You can find it on your way home."

     The walk to LaMonte School from our house on Hanken Road was only a half mile, but the zigzag passage through strange neighborhoods seemed daunting. I was afraid to walk it alone despite assurances from my mother and older siblings that it was safe. Sixth-grader Bobby and fourth-grader Kathy called me a big baby, but Karla agreed to go with me the whole way there. She showed me every shortcut - across the Codrington Park ball fields, along a narrow foot path through a weedy lot, and behind the next house out onto LaMonte Avenue. I'd follow this route to and from school every weekday for the next seven years except when occasionally diverted by a new friend who lived to one side or the other of my preferred path.

     Kindergarten lasted a half day then, so I'd be on my own on the way home. All that fall day I'd imagined the big red cat I'd rescue from that leaf pile. When the noon bell finally rang I ran out the door and, retracing the morning route, arrived at the mound to find a group of mothers gathered around.

     "It's alive!" screams an older woman backing away. "I'll go get Detective Cozza."

"Stay back," cautions another lady with a hand on my chest. "It might be poisonous."

     Soon the plain-clothed policeman strides across Grove Avenue, glances at the snake stretched out along the curb, and takes control.

"Everybody away!" he commands, pulling a small pistol from a hip holster. "It's a copperhead."