-Roderick Haig-Brown
-Free. The. Fighter!
The Bend in the Stream
Every boy needs a place to grow up...my place was cane creek.
We’d moved from the only home I’d known for eight years to a new town for my dad to start his new job and for us to start ‘our new life’. After renting a little house in town for a few months, we finally found a farmhouse, hidden in a little valley, tucked into the Ozark foothills. Surrounding the little white house was an uneven patchwork of pastures, fence rows, and stock ponds. The eastern border of the property was a red dirt road that snaked through the valley, the western border was the creek.
It seems every region in the Ozarks has its own labyrinth of streams and rivers where young explorers find their “secret spots’. For a few fleeting summers, Cane Creek was mine. It was mine to cope with the loneliness of leaving my small home town and all of my friends, and living 10 miles from my new town and 5 miles from any neighbors my age. Mine to adjust to the change of becoming a big brother after eight years of being an only child. But mostly it was mine to be free.
In summer, when the weather was nice, I went fishing or exploring nearly every day. I would climb the creaking metal gate and trek the path beaten down by the farm trucks and the cattle as they they came up to the barn at night. At the end of the half mile walk was a clearing, the gateway up a grassy hill that fell off into a mud bluff overlooking a deep hole at a bend in the creek. This was the place that caused me to fall deeply in love with the streams and rivers of the Missouri Ozarks, and the fish and wildlife that call them home.
I remember vividly, as my dad and I waded the shallows fishing, the rapid pools how we stumbled onto a strange swimming pancake that turned out to be a softshell turtle. Only to turn around and catch our breath as we found ourselves face-to-face with a great gray owl, magnified by my boyish perception, which seemed 6 feet tall. Only casually disturbed by our presence, it cocked its enormous head to the side and took flight, in an eerie, almost sacred silence. As it effortlessly floated away, it's enormous wingspan filled the entire width between the trees on either side of the creek (or so it seemed).
I often waded, explored, and fished the creek for miles and miles, but it was in the honey hole at the bend, against the bluff, where I caught my first smallmouth. No more than 10 inches long, the smooth olive green body ice cold from the spring fed waters contrasting with the blazing, liquid red eyes left me captivated me. I can still see that fish in my hands; glistening in the sun, thick and powerful, and I remember the ripples as she turned tail and retreated back to her home in the bend of the stream.
It's hard to explain, but something significant happened that day. It seems a part of me came alive, that still lives and breathes inside me, that calls me back again and again to the clear, cold waters of the Ozarks, back to the freedom of boyhood, back to the safety of my secret places.
It's been almost 30 years since those days and many things have changed. I've caught thousands of small mouth since then and one would think they would lose their significance, but nearly every single one takes me back to that bend in the stream. At times, there’s still a dull ache in my soul, as I remember the sound of the frogs chorusing when the sun started to hide behind the trees signaling the time to start for home.
Places like this and others have made me who I am. I have to think it would do us all good to go back, even if only in our daydreams, to the safe, secret places of our childhood; to remember why we love the outdoors, our families, our friends, and to marvel at the reality that God himself would choose to drag his fingers across the earth, marking it with such profound beauty and complexity, then say to us, “here it is, enjoy”.
Over the years, I've come to learn there’s a boy inside every fisherman, longing to go back to somewhere and remember something. So, where is your somewhere, and what is your something?
Dalton Avery
Pastor at Life360 Church Republic
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