I walked down the path, shivering, wet, and spluttering. I threw up creek water and sprayed it out my nose, struggling for breath, and finally finding it. The swim to the surface had been deceptively far! Continuing to splutter and occasionally gag, I hurriedly put my dry shoes and socks back on, but with the rivulets of creekwater running down my legs from my sodden shorts and clinging, striped fashion-T, I could already feel them beginning to grow damp. I knew they would be squishy before I made it home if I didn't do something about it.
"Mama's going to be so mad!" I said to myself, and then If you take your shoes off once you're past the spring so your socks stay mostly dry, and then go in through the back you can make sure she doesn't find out. I promise.
“Hmmm” I thought about that, as I tried to calm my still-choking breath. Mama had been grumpy with me when I left the house... It seemed like an age ago. It had to have been at least a month! She was probably worried… I suddenly realized that everyone in the family must've been looking for me!
A wave a guilt and panic washed over me as I finished traversing the rocks leading from under My Waterfall up to the path along the ravine, and headed through the bit of overgrown rocky trail between it and the boulders and seep-spring a bit further up the hill. I noticed the racing clouds were thinning, and flashes of sunlight streamed down, gold and green through the trees, and began to calm my frigid, panicked shivering.
As I got to the clearing around the limestone seep-spring I slowed. Several boulders and shelves covered in loose gravel and scraggly patches of grass were in front of me, and the trees opened out around the area, bounded on the uphill side by a huge fallen oak log which had been there since before me and my brother had first been shown this path. It wound along one of the limestone shelves and between several of the smaller, flat knee-high boulders, pieces of the shelf that had broken off and slowly slid down the hill over who knows how many millennia, and were now on the downhill side of the area. A small trickle of water ran down from another limestone shelf ten or fifteen feet up the hill just above the middle of the overgrown clearing and crossed the path. The spring had been dry that morning, but it looked like the storm had gotten it going again.
The warmth in the clearing felt like such a revelation, that I failed to realize that “that morning” must have been long ago, at least from my nine-year-old perspective, and instead the thought popped unbidden into my head that I should climb up on the largest boulder (which was only about four feet tall) and sun myself to recover.
It seemed like a brilliant idea and I was thankful for some sense of direction and stability in the middle of my dawning confusion. Once I had scrambled on top of it I took my shoes and socks off and laid the socks with their damp tops on the warm surface, and considered. I didn't like taking my shirt off outside, especially when my friends were visiting, but they hadn't wanted to go with me to The Waterfall when I had set out, so there was probably nothing to worry about unless they came looking for me.
I was again briefly overwhelmed with confusion, because surely they had been taken home the day I disappeared! However long ago it had been, surely Ms James wouldn'tve had Mama watch Jessie and Frankie with me missing? I wondered how long I might have actually been gone, and I felt incredibly worried about my little brother. He was my second best-friend after my Florence (Flo) who we used to live across the street from, and we all spent so much time in these woods together! He must be having a really terrible time! And Flo too! I needed to get home!!!
No, wait, calm down. I thought, as I took off my cold and sodden shirt and laid it and myself on the warm boulder to dry. This is so confusing, but I’m here now, and I can figure this out. It should be easy enough. Just lay here for a minute, warm up, calm down, and think. The Creek is still high, just like when you fell into it. It almost never gets that high except after storms. The last of the storm-clouds just blew away!
I took off my shoes and laid my socks out on the rock as well, and then gave up and stripped off my shorts and laid there on the rocks, drying in my briefs under the warm late-afternoon sun. The Waterfall was still roaring along in the distance, and I realized also that it was in almost the same position as it had been when I’d taken my accidental plunge into the splash pool. What had happened after that…
I shook my head, trying to clear the cobwebs. Hallucinations? I didn’t know much about them. Daddy and Mama said that sometimes people on drugs had those. Maybe I’d had one when I was under the rushing, pounding water of My Waterfall? A cascade of images roared through my head, with a force comparable to what had entombed me just a little while before. I… I had taken off my shoes and socks after the… before… no, that’s it. The Storm had happened that afternoon, but after an hour of the most intense rain I had ever experienced in the nine years of my life, it had suddenly stopped, with only occasional sprinkles spattering down.
There had been no lightning, so Mama had said we could go out and play in it, but to stay away from the creek that ran through the woods along the holler bellow the gravel road that ran in front of our house. We’d spent a while playing in the run-off that was running down our front steps, and my brother and our friends had eventually decided to go inside. I had always loved the rain tho, and it had been a hot summer, so I asked if I could stay out in it alone, and Mama had said yes.
So I’d done what I often did when I was out and about on my own and gone to visit The Waterfall. Mama had said not to go near the creek, but I figured that if I stayed on the path above it then I wouldn’t be “near” it. When I had made it there down the 1/2 mile path through the dripping woods, full of birdsong and green-gold light, I could see “near” was relative. The unnamed Creek had flooded and carried boulders the size of cars that had sat above The Waterfall downstream who knew how-far, but they were gone now. And the Creek was prolly four or five feet above where it normally lay, and easily six above where it had been that morning. It had been a dry summer, and it was thrilling and beautiful to see The Waterfall then!
I had never seen anything like it, being a relativelly untraveled kid from a tiny Ozarks town, and it made me think of stories about Niagra Falls, or better yet, the Falls of Rauros from Lord of the Rings, which I’d read for myself just the year prior! So I couldn’t resist the urge to feel it, even if just with one foot. I was an obedient kid, but I rationalized that I wouldn’t be get this chance again, and I wouldn’t be “near” where the Creek normally ran, right?
And that was that. I had scrambled down the steep rocky slope, swinging from one sapling-trunk to the next like I always did when we came to visit. I stopped on the last shelf of stone that was normally midway down the side of the bank, and was now being lapped and splattered by the ardent rush! I felt a deep thrill as I was spattered by spray, and quickly peeled off my shoes and socks and set them in a crook of soil against the uphill side of a sapling that clung to the bank at what was now chest-height to me.
Carefully, and with surer-footing on the wet stone now that I was barefoot, I had dipped a toe, and then one of my feet into the rushing water. It felt amazing! Cool as the rain it had been just a few minutes ago, and with a swirling, surging force, like when I’d sometimes sit in the main stream during normal flow, but here, right at the edge! It was tantalizing, so I sat on the rock and carefully put both feet in, slowly becoming more and more daring, eventually flexing my body and putting most of my weight on my hands, with only a bit of the stone edge of the shelf I was on supporting a small bit of my butt, as I put my legs deep into the gloriously-cascading flow. I’d just realized I was getting the hem of my shorts wet when there was a cracking rumble from the stone underneath me and it shifted. Everything seemed to move in slow-motion as what had moments before been a solid limestone shelf became a shifting and sliding boulder, and I managed to snatch half a breath and think “Jesus, help me!” as I fell into the flood.