We are a green trickle.
A trickle can dissipate into the soil. Or it can join other trickles and become a creek.
The neighborhood in which I grew up was divided by height. My family lived at the nadir of the valley, but far enough in that our neighbors were teachers and librarians and workers in commercial spaces. Up either of the bluffs that surrounded us were the doctors and lawyers and CEOs.
A drainage system large enough that young children could crawl through it led rainfall to a creek at the park down the street. My friends and I would find places to climb down into the tubes and then make our way to the park subterraeneally. There was a spot across the street from my house. If we felt more adventurous, there was another one up the street. To get to the tubes from there, you had to be skinny, so I never went through that portal. Skinny Andrew got stuck once.
I preferred starting at the park, where the water emerged from a giant opening, sputtering into a little river where I caught toads and floated invented boats. Sewage. I went backwards and sometimes ran headlong into a neighbor. I’d have to scoot backwards, not seeing where I was going, so we wouldn’t both asphyxiate.
When it stormed, the basement flooded. It always seemed like a surprise, and my parents would go into frantic triage mode. It always seemed like a surprise, down at the bottom of the valley, where someone felt the need to build a complex network of tubes to direct water to my creek. Oh shit. The basement flooded. Who knew?
If it was a particularly nice day, a day when the children felt subversive, we could take the creek all the way to school. We’d have to climb up a hill and cross a street, but the drainoff of the valley could get us all the way there. We’d have to go through more tubes to get past the highway, but it was doable. I know it was doable because I did it, along with a motley gang of disenchanted Gen X boys and girls who were mostly just bored because we seldom saw our parents.
We are a green trickle.
The creek is no longer there, nor, I suppose, is the subterraenean route from the valley to the elementary school. I’m not sure how they mitigated the water, but they did something. It’s dry. By the school, the drainage creek has huge concrete walls that no child could scale. That happened decades ago, but not long enough ago that I don’t remember what it used to look like. I used to be in that creekbed. Now, a child down there would be a tragedy.
As a green trickle, I’ve learned where to go and where not to go. I’ve been trained. But I still have a scar on my leg from when I turned wrong getting out of the sewer, hitting the sharp aluminum where the drainage system ended and the creek started. I bled into the creek, and my friends watched the red udulate and swirl without purpose before moving on.
Somewhere, under that concrete, is my blood.