My summer has shrunk to the size of a regular old day off. All there is left of it is tomorrow. And I only got one creekwalk in. I wanted to take one today, but then I realized I had band practice. The one I got was on Friday or Saturday. I don’t remember which. I was about to go somewhere and was putting on my shoes when Aaron called me. He asked if I wanted to go creeking. I decided creekwalking was more important than where I was going and biked up to his house to show him some maps.

I had figured we’d either go to the Railroad (doubted it even then) or on a creekwalk I haven’t done before, the school to Winton Woods. But Aaron surprised me by telling me of a different creek he knew, one that emanated from a place called Melody Park right down a street from his house. I checked my trusty topography sources and saw that it joined up with the creek behind the school to got to Winton Woods as well. Since Aaron’s printer wouldn’t work, I freehanded a little map, and we had a few cups of water, and we left his house.

I didn’t know what Melody Park might look like. And as we walked down Melody Lane, which ended in a cul-de-sac a hundred yards from where it started, I didn’t even see where it might be. Then when we got to the end I noticed there was a little sidewalk running between two houses. I discovered that the sidewalk runs under a few trees and then turns into a shallow staircase going down a very tall hill to a field lined with tall grass hiding the creek. The creek was different from other creeks, but then all creeks are. It had a lot of rocks around, good for stepping on, and it ran right behind a bunch of backyards. There was almost no room for walking on either shore: there was a vertical bank and then a very thick forest. Luckily the rocks were there for a lot of the time. When they weren’t we had to either go through the forest or try to cling to the bank, sometimes by using trees to hold onto. One time while moving down a shore and hanging onto trees one after another, leaning out backwards over the creek, I fell in and dunked my shoes, but other than that we were mainly successful. We named a few places along the way. A tree across the creek from the yard of a guy who kept talking on his cell phone was “Stop Here and Rest a Moment”, and a log somewhere farther along was “Chillin’ Log”. Right around Chillin’ Log I found a black plastic A. I gave it to Aaron. And we made jokes, and that sort of stuff. You know, the kind of stuff you do with friends.

The creek we were on sideswipes Daly Road, and we had started hearing traffic, but the traffic wasn’t coming from the right angle to be Daly. Sure enough, when we came up it was Compton, which I then realized we hadn’t crossed yet. We did then, and found the creek again running under the Jerome W Sirk bridge. To the left of the bridge it forked away, but we took the right fork and kept on going. The creek was a little wider here and the bank was a little flatter. A while further on the woods at the left bank vanished and as I stood on the other bank, on the edge of what appeared to be a bridge that was demolished, I saw across the creek what looked like some kind of religious building–a pyramid with about twenty sides, and inflated a little so it was convex. Then I looked through the open doorway and realized it was a salt storage dome. While I stood there a green county pickup truck wandered aimlessly there. Aaron caught up and we took advantage of the road that had once crossed the creek on the now-defunct bridge. It was paved with gravel and it ran alongside the creek. It ended at a road. The road was Compton.

And here I figured we were farther along than that. Across the street was a condo complex called Bridgecreek, featuring the creek running under a nice bridge. To the right was Cherryblossom. I checked my freehand map again and couldn’t figure out where we might be. Aaron decided we must’ve made a wrong turn at the Jerome W Sirk bridge so far back, and rather than keep going we decided to follow Cherryblossom back to his neighborhood. In retrospect it was probably a good thing we stopped there, since we were both probably somewhere close to dehydrated. We hadn’t brought bottles, because there weren’t any handy. Cherryblossom turned out to end right near Skyline Chili, so we stopped there and with the sixteen dollars we had together bought a modest but filling meal and drank a lot of free refills. We also tried to visit BJ, but he wasn’t home so we walked back to Aaron’s, stopping at Andy Hughes’s place along the way.

Yesterday Dad took me to bigg’s and we bought some school supplies–mainly notebooks and folders. I want to go to Office Depot and get some more #3 Pencils, because I’m running out. I bought, like, five dozen one time about three years ago and they’ve lasted me until now.

So school starts on Wednesday. Bright and early at 0720 for us band kids. I think the first day of school should start at noon. And while I’m at it, I also don’t think you should have to go to school on your birthday. Oh, and I can’t wait for winter. Mrs Rielac up the street says this one’s probably going to be a hard one, judging by how there are already berries on her magnolia and acorns on the ground. That means more snow, and thus more snow days!