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."