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The Mud Gang
In 1970, shortly after my fifth birthday, my family moved to a split-level house in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Unlike the flat and treeless landscape we were used to (our old neighborhood in Louisiana had been surrounded by cotton fields), this new home was surrounded by pine trees, and it was situated on a lot that sloped steadily down from the road. The neighborhood was relatively new, so there was also a lot of undeveloped land nearby, most of it wooded.
At the very rear of our lot, behind an old barbed-wire fence and a thicket of undergrowth, ran what we called simply the Creek. We never knew any name for it, nor do USGS maps give it one; it’s an insignificant tributary that feeds into Little Dutchman Creek, which in turn joins Big Dutchman Creek, which eventually empties into the Catawba River. Only a few feet wide and a few inches deep in most places, it was easy to cross, either by wading or hopping from rock to rock.
For us kids, the Creek had great significance: it was the boundary between home and adventure. Each day’s travels began the same way. We headed out across the nicely maintained backyard; we followed the path that curved around the base of the bent oak tree, climbed over the rusty barbed wire and through the tangle of kudzu (and occasionally poison ivy), and descended the steep bank to the Creek. We’d hop and splash across, climb the opposite bank, and we’d be there: Across The Creek. The wilderness.
But the Creek wasn’t just a boundary. It was also a destination in its own right: cool clear water trickling over rocks and swirling in pools, minnows darting in the sunlit water, crayfish crawling on the bottom, water striders gliding across the surface. And even the occasional thrill of fear when someone spotted, or claimed to have spotted, a water moccasin. (I don’t remember ever seeing one myself, but I suppose they were around.)
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For a handful of years during the mid-’70s, my best friends were the next-door kid Tommy, his younger sister Terry, and the kid from another house down, Brian. We liked to form ourselves into what we called “clubs,” even though each club’s membership consisted of the same four people; the “club” was just a label for whatever we were going to do that day. Most of these clubs were forgotten one-shots, but the one we kept coming back to was The Mud Gang. The Mud Gang was Tommy, Terry, Brian, and me, clad in rubber boots, exploring the Creek.
It was like visiting an alternate universe. The Creek ran parallel to our road, so by splashing upstream or downstream along its bed we could travel from backyard to backyard. There was something almost otherworldly about entering the Creek from my backyard and emerging back into the normal suburban world behind Tommy’s house or Brian’s house. We got to know the part of the Creek that ran behind our three houses: which parts were deep or shallow, where the loose rocks were, where the crossing was easiest, and the best places to climb the banks.
Most of the time we had no particular objective: we were just splashing around aimlessly and tossing rocks to see how big a splash we could make (and, of course, getting muddy). But there were a couple of epic adventures I remember to this day, occasions when The Mud Gang decided to mount expeditions more ambitious than the usual.
One day we decided to keep following the Creek downstream, past Brian’s house, as far as we could. For the first time, we crossed into regions of the Creek that were unfamiliar to us. We passed under India Hook Road, the main road that passed our neighborhood, and for the first time saw the bridge from the underside; we continued to follow the Creek as it left our neighborhood and crossed into wholly foreign territory. It was strange and exciting, but not too scary: there was no way we could get lost as long as we had the Creek to lead us back home. With no familiar landmarks, I fancied that we made it several miles from home before finally deciding it was time to turn back. (In reality, it was probably half a mile at most.)
Our boldest adventure, though, was closer to home. Behind Brian’s house, a large underground concrete pipe (maybe three feet in diameter) opened onto the Creek. This was the outlet from a storm drain that connected to a ditch across the street, maybe a hundred yards away. We’d seen it many times, yawning dark and foreboding, as we passed. Now we decided to conquer it. Equipped with flashlights, we turned aside from the Creek, climbed into the pipe, and proceeded to work our way, crouching and crawling, along its length. It was slow going as we crept under Brian’s back and front yards, then under the wide road, all the time heading toward the spot of light we could see far ahead.
In those days parents were not paranoid, and ours never worried about us when we were gone for hours. I suspect, though, they would have had misgivings about us crawling through the sewers. But we encountered nothing more hazardous than spiderwebs, and eventually, we emerged into the sunlight across the street from Brian’s house. If anyone saw us emerging from the storm drain, I wonder what they thought.
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During the last decade or so, my wife and I have discovered the joys of travel. We started with a relatively modest trip to New York, and since then we’ve been to London and to Japan (twice). This year we were going to take an Alaska cruise, but the pandemic scuttled those plans. I don’t know what next year holds, but as soon as we can we will travel again. We’re hooked, and we have told our financial advisor that our retirement plan must include an annual travel budget.
It occurs to me that the impulse to travel (at least for me) comes from the same desires that motivated the Mud Gang. The desire to get out, to experience something foreign, to see the world from a new perspective. As an adult, it’s easy for me to let my life fall into rhythms dictated by routine and duty, and easy to forget what I knew when I was a kid: that that sense of adventure can be found close to home, if you just walk a little bit farther than you usually do, or turn left at the storm drain to see where it goes. I don’t know when we’ll be able to travel overseas again, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have an adventure, even if it’s a little one.
Today we live on a large wooded lot in North Carolina, and as it happens, at the back of our lot flows a small creek. It doesn’t have a name; it’s just an insignificant tributary that empties into the Haw River. I almost never see it. But this weekend I think I will put on my boots and go down there.
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And it will be a nice weekend to do just that. We have a nice little creek behind our house called Terrible Creek that feeds into Middle Creek. We have followed the creek before to find old abandoned vehicles and lots of swampy land. We don’t usually do this in the summertime. I’m not a fan of the slithering critters. Let us know what you find on your adventure this weekend.
Love it.
Ancient of days.
Sounds like My childhood; just throw in climbing trees to catch locusts and occasionally hitching a ride to the mall in the bed of a pickup.
Edit to add: We had one rule, be Home before streetlights come on.
Similarly, when I was a kid we had a park nearby with a short section of creek running through it. It came out of a small culvert, traversed the park and entered a large culvert that was big enough for kids to enter and explore. Taking along our flashlights, we would follow the pipe to the Y intersection where going left would take us to the evaporation pond and going right took us uphill into the storm sewer system. We could get as far as the busy road a couple hundred yards along the way, but then the pipes narrowed too much for even our comfort to go any further. Today there are bars over the larger culvert preventing anyone from going in.
Are there still kids in America who live like this? Maybe they are keeping it a secret from us so we won’t spoil it with all our “What Ifs”.
Lovely, BXO. I love to explore with you and your friends. Hoping next year will offer some travels for you.
I hope there are. I’m sure there are, in other countries where people have more important things to worry about. But I can’t even remember the last time I saw a kid riding a bike around here.
Somehow, the safer life gets, the more afraid we become.
I’d say the kids you are looking for live in the country. My nieces and nephew do this sort of thing all the time. They don’t live in town, but my nephew does live in a subdivision in the county. He and his friend ride bikes and explore all the time.
We definitely live in the country, but that actually might be why I don’t see kids riding bikes around. We live in a widely spaced neighborhood where the houses are all on large lots, and the road is a narrow gravel road. So there aren’t actually a lot of kids around here, and it’s not a great place to ride bikes. (It’s the same reason we don’t get trick-or-treaters.) So you’re probably right that the kids are out there and we just don’t see them.
I love this post, Mr Ogilvie. It brought back memories of childhood adventures; also very long walks in the woods I took every day with my children one summer when the community pool I had been counting on closed. (We often walked to a stream and called the spot “Narnia”.)
I’m not big on traveling. But my husband and I need to start making ourselves get out again. You only can continue to clearly see your own environment if you’re sometimes coming back to it with fresh eyes, I think.
Those who are interested in this topic might want to follow Lenore Skenazy’s “Free-Range Kids” blog at https://www.freerangekids.com/. I used to follow it some years ago. She has a lot of support for her way of letting kids do things and go places unsupervised, and also runs into a lot of haters and sneerers. I don’t remember when I first heard of her, but I presume her own free-range kid is grown and out on his/her own by now.