Yobburbs
December 26th, 2005 by jamMon December 26, 2005
Yobburbs
A giant 29yo man walks down a mountainous slope along a road to where an ancient creek ducks underneath it.
He looks over the bridge railing to the murky slop below, and remembers the day in his childhood when he first saw the oily slick of road-runoff pollution on its otherwise beautiful surface. Now, more than twenty years later, it is a thick morass of slime, choked with weeds and clumps of foaming blue-green algae.
He leaves the road and follows the creek, remembering trout leaping out of its waters, and in the shallows the shapes of many fish. He remembers seeing a turtle further down - and further upstream a place where the water was glassy clear and freshwater eels fed on a kind of watercress.
He recalls the long hot summer days where the creek’s mysterious bends disappeared into the distance, hidden by the boughs of trees and misted by flights of dragonflies hunting smaller insects.
Most of this is gone now. Many of the trees have been cut, and the water seems too foul to support dragonfly larvae. Hell it’s dawn, and there are no mosquitoes about - could it be that poisonous? Certainly a vile stench bubbles up from the water’s surface.
There is a lot of plant life, mostly in the creek or on its banks, now totally choking access to the water in most places. This is primarily evidence that no humans go near the water anymore, whereas children used to play in and around it. He remembers swinging from weeping-willow strands into knee-deep water after school.
He follows the creek up to where the path is fenced off for the horses, except there could be no horses anymore. The path is now totally overgrown with things they would normally eat, and the fence is in no condition to stop a determined horse escaping.
He retraces his steps, and crosses back over the road to see the creek further up. Once there had been a very artificial field of grass here, that flooded when it rained, but has now become a sort of swamp.
The creek life is completely dead, yet the area has attained an intense beauty, with the weeping willows (possibly even ones the boy planted himself) growing tall and thick, closing off an area of marsh that used to be little more than backhoe tracks in grass and mud. An area that a boy onced trapsed through endlessly in gumboots, sometimes even in the rain, watching frogs and other marsh creatures go about their business. The frogs are not totally gone, but they are greatly reduced in number. He has heard two all morning. All around the field are the back fences of suburbia, many overgrown by the thick subtropical flora.
It is still a beautiful place with no shortage of birds and insects, but it’s missing most of the creek and pond life, and there are no signs whatsoever of exploring children. What adult would let their children explore these vile waterways, or in this day and age play unguarded in such an area, with so many paedophiles and murderers around? (Though the man can see none at present)
He remembers that the boy had many sexual experiences as a child, but none of them were with adults…
The sun is rising. Soon the halo of light that lets him peer into the thick undergrowth will become the roaring photonic shower that hurts the eyes and burns the skin. He turns for home and the cooling safety of the chemically-perfect pool.
Under the water, at the bottom of the pool, upside down and holding my nose so it doesn’t flood, staring at the dawn sky framed by branches and shrubs, I reflect that things might have been different if we’d thought to build a *separate* drainage system for road runoff. Even just for every second creek - every valley between these foothills has its own creek that meanders out to the sea, and now every last one of them is almost devoid of native creek life, and as ignored by the locals as any other sewer.
I wonder still, what they would’ve been like before white settlement at all. This still-beautiful place was once covered in one giant forest that stretched from the mountains to the beaches, and these creeks date back from that era. They must have been absolutely teeming with life that now largely lives in books and in the fading memories of a few little boys who no longer even own gumboots.
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