More than seventy years later, I can see it in my mind’s eye.
I hear it in my mind’s ear.
I smell it in my mind’s nose.
The Stink Crick.
It was a winding watercourse, an evil stream, a creek, but we called it a crick. Like the wryness that seized your spine after you slept the wrong way—“I had a crick in my neck the whole dadgum day”—only in this usage, it denoted a minor flow of water.
The Stink Crick flowed through a wasteland we called The Bottoms, a ragged jungle between the bluffs of Streator, Illinois, and the Vermilion River some eighty feet below. The crick sent a sulfurous odor through the whole Bottoms, that wild gnarly world through which we roved in spring, summer, fall, and winter.
We never supposed that The Bottoms belonged to anyone in particular, as real estate; it was our playground as if we owned it ourselves. It was like the land the boys traversed in Stephen King’s novella The Body, later made into the film Stand By Me. Only we never found a dead body—oops, sorry about the spoiler.
The subcutaneous parts of Jackie Perisho’s lower leg were revealed, however—and you’ve got to admit that’s something.
In those days, I thought the Stink Crick’s bad smell came from the sewage of cheap houses along the southern reach of its meander, but now I doubt that was the cause. I am latterly inclined to believe the all-pervasive smell was the mere outgassing of dissolved hydrogen sulfide from cold water springs in the surrounding bluffs. At least, I hope so.
The smell did not balk us one bit. We scouted the Stink Crick’s basin, ran up and down its banks, along trails faint and broad, at the very edge of the crick, and up over hillocks, through thickets of sumac, wild raspberry, and nondescript green creepy foliage. The lower parts of The Bottoms were choked with rotting trees and hanging, ropy vines.
But we did not fear; we were masters of the jungle, or at least determined to be so. Against the surrounding spookiness we built forts: Indefensible, symbolic palisades of sticks and woven weeds, held in place by twists of discarded baling-wire dumped by some nameless benefactor beside the old shale road that ran down the middle of The Bottoms.
The shale road ran down from the corner of River Avenue and Court Street, through The Bottoms, crossed the Stink Crick on a small bridge, and ran out of the jungle on to a flat plain, which held an old brickyard to the south and a cornfield to the north.
My best pal, Jon Anders, and I, in company with a few friends from LaSalle Street, thought it would be a good idea to explore that cornfield one day, under a hot August sun. We’d gotten about halfway through it when a deep bellow greeted us. “You goddam kids! Get outta that corn right now! I’m comin’ after ya! I’ll get the cops on ya! I’ll tell your mas and pas!”
We ran like the wind all the way back to the Stink Crick and didn’t stop till we got safely on the other side, breathless. It is stored in my memory as an escape in the dark night, with the angry farmer firing several shotgun blasts, narrowly missing our heads. But in reality it was daylight, no firearms were discharged, and we scampered like panicked field mice. The man probably meant us no harm but simply wanted to protect his hard-won crop from damage by heedless children.
I only mention this incident to show you what stout-hearted, Homeric souls we were, and what adventures we therefore had.
If you didn’t go to The Bottoms via River Avenue and the old shale road, you could get there by simply walking down the hill from our backyard. The hill was long and steep, perfect for sledding, half of it bare and half wooded.
You could ride a sled down the bare side of the hill, of course. But what fun was that, compared with riding the Snake Path—a twisting, tortuous track that threaded through the thicket of trees on the wooded side of the hill? We did this on runner sleds, Gentle Reader—Flexible Flyers and American Flyers—and we made them fly!
You laid yourself down on a slim wooden deck, feet hanging off the back end, body kept six inches off the ground by twin steel runners. Those parallel runners gave a fatal directionality to your swift descent. To disrupt that straight-line plunge, in case there was a tree looming—of which there were many on the Snake Path—you yanked hard on the left or right end of the wooden steering bar while planting a galoshed toe to serve as a pivot point.
Once you learned the six or seven hairpin turns on the Snake Path, you could reach the bottom at a pretty good speed. I don’t know what speed exactly, but fast enough to lift you and the sled into the air from the ramp-like hump of earth at the bottom of the path. You flew eight or ten feet, landed with a THUMP!, and if at that moment you yanked once more, sharply to the right, you could coast down the ice-coated shale road all the way to the little bridge.
It’s too bad there was no medal or ribbon given for this feat, for we all earned it many times over, with multiple oak leaf clusters.
That bridge, in fairer weather, became the scene of a more sinister moment when Jon Anders and I happened on a couple of local bullies, Paul Reynolds and Tom McCann. They were huddled by the side of the bridge, smoking cigarettes. We probably said something to them about that, like “You shouldn’t be smoking.” We were goody-goodies, and Boy Scouts to boot.
It must have been Jon who shot off his mouth, because he was the one Paul and Tom started shoving around. They said things like, “Who you gonna tell?” and “Mind your own business.” It got tense for a few moments. I could tell Jon wanted to throw a punch, but he held himself in check. The two bullies were each as big as Jon was, but I was a lot smaller, being two years younger. I reckon he didn’t like the odds in that dust-up. Eventually they went away, and we went on about our adventures.
It seemed like any time we got near that bridge, or crossed the crick, trouble found us.
And not just us. The Bottoms and the Stink Crick had it in for girls, too.
One day I was by myself in a tree halfway down the big hill, practicing how to walk out on a long limb, bending it down and jumping off at the last minute—an essential skill for swashbucklers in those parts. I had nearly reached the end of the branch when Cheryl Marvin came charging up the hill, hollering “Get help! Jackie fell and tore her leg open. It’s real bad.”
“Huh?” I said. “How bad?”
“It’s all open. You can see inside her leg and everything.” Cheryl stopped to huff and puff.
“Where is she?”
“Down by the crick!” Huff, puff. “Hurry, run home and call somebody for help.”
I sprang into action. I jumped off the branch and ran down the hill to find Jackie Perisho and see what Cheryl meant by “her whole leg is open and you can see inside.”
When I got there, Jackie was lying on the ground, on the far side of the crick, looking embarrassed. Maybe even mortified, though I didn’t know that word yet.
“Hi,” I said. “What happened?”
“I fell,” she said. “Caught my leg on a stick, and here I am.”
“Yeah,” I acknowledged.
I mean, yes: there she was, all right.
“Looks pretty bad.” I had never seen living calf muscles inside a person’s leg before. “Maybe you should just lay still until help comes. Cheryl went to get some.”
“I know,” Jackie said.
We continued to converse in like manner for several minutes until the fire department’s first-aid squad and a flock of concerned parents showed up. The first-aiders closed the big flap of flesh over the exposed meat of the leg and wrapped it tight in gauze, then put her on a stretcher and took her away.
I never did mention to anyone the fact that by Cheryl’s plan I was supposed to go for help instead of running down to the crick and comforting the victim while Cheryl, out of breath, was left to trudge up the hill and find a responsible adult. I doubt anybody but Cheryl and I ever knew that. And she never brought it up afterwards, perhaps because she did not expect anything better of me anyhow.
Jackie, by the way, recovered. We never had major tragedies in The Bottoms. Only close calls.
One bright summer day some of our relations came visiting from out of town. I took my Aunt Linda, who is about three years older than I, exploring in The Bottoms. I mean, when you have an outstanding local attraction, you naturally want to show it off.
I took her around and showed her all the forts we had built, and the places where the Court Street Gang had built forts that we had torn down for them. And a lot of other neat stuff besides. On our way back, I took a shortcut—a big old log over the Stink Crick, not far from where Jackie had fallen down and opened up her leg.
I scampered across the log as I always did, but I suppose there was some slippery moss or something of the sort on the upper side of the log. Aunt Linda fell in.
It was not life-threatening, but it was gross. Right at that spot there was a little bend where the water eddied and collected in a stagnant pool, about chest deep on Aunt Linda, that was full of all sorts of slimy, stinky, disgusting blackish substances. Smelly, too.
I may possibly have laughed, because she was quite a sight. But she didn’t think it was funny.
I pulled her out and led her up the hill to our house. We made a beeline for the driveway, where our green garden hose was hooked to the side of the house. I turned it on and hosed her down. Though she was upset to be covered in filthy, disgusting slime, being renched down in ice-cold water did not brighten her outlook any, that I could tell.
In the seven intervening decades she has forgiven me. I think.
I could tell you other adventures that happened in The Bottoms, along the banks of the Stink Crick. But you get the idea.
I pulled together some boyhood memories of the Stink Creek, and sandlot baseball and other such things, in my middle-grade coming-of-age novel Izzy Strikes Gold! I had to rearrange reality in order to make a work of fiction—in which the whole is supposed to add up to more than the sum of its parts—but nevertheless, it’s pretty true to life.
All put together, I don’t suppose my childhood doings amounted to a hill of beans. The only thing to commend them is: this is just the kind of stuff life is actually made of, especially when you are young. Or at least, it used to be.
I do wonder if kids today have places like The Bottoms and the Stink Crick, places that give full scope for their curious, questing selves. I suppose some do have them. But a lot of kids today could never have pointless-yet-formative exploits such as Jon and I and our friends had. Many kids, even my own grandchildren, have all their time programmed and every experience curated to remove risk and add enrichment.
We never got enriched and we were constantly in peril. Not because our parents didn’t care about us, but they were just so busy doing important grown-up stuff that they assumed we could keep ourselves entertained.
From having revisited the terrain in recent years, I can tell you that sledding hill is now only half as long and half as steep, and most of the trees are gone. The Bottoms and the Stink Crick, bulldozed and fenced off by a private contractor, are nowhere to be seen.
They persist in my mind, and perhaps a few other old folk’s minds, for a few more years into the future. Then they’ll just dry up and blow away. As if they were never there.
But it was a great place to be a kid. I pray future generations will find enchantments of like dimension.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
