Experiencing Nature in Warren County, Indiana 6 (Last Installment in This Series)

It’s odd how the memory works. When I was in high school, I parked my 1953 Packard along Old 55 and took a short walk down a narrow stream that fed Big Pine Creek nearby. It was noon on a summer’s day. The red-winged blackbirds were trilling. The general buzz of insect life was less along the water than in the meadows above, and I heard the water trickling around smooth stones.

The Tranquility of a Stream

Drawing by Bruce Crane (1857–1937)

Engraved by John Sanderson Dalziel (1839–1937)

In The Closing Scene

Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1887

The colors in the stream bed were magnificent: pale green rocks within a setting of vibrant ocher and tan. I was surprised but not scared when I detected the tail of a blue racer snake as it hid from me in the sedge. Higher up the bank, monarch and black swallowtail butterflies visited the tall flowers of the old meadows. The stretches of pebbly earth beside the water twinkled with cabbage, sulphur, and alfalfa butterflies. An occasional dragonfly buzzed past, as if on a mission.   

I recall feeling at peace with the earth. The sensation was profound. It endured for the interval of time that I was strolling near the water. The drifting clouds in the bright azure sky accompanied me both above and in reflection while I took a few steps and paused to appreciate a wildflower before taking a few more steps and pausing again.

Since that summer’s day years ago, I have met celebrities, toured historical sites, visited great cities, and crossed the ocean, but none of the memories that I have made while engaged in these later activities have been as sharply detailed, as deeply engraved, and as often revisited as my recollection of the tributary to Big Pine Creek in my hometown. When I parked my car that day, I had no intention of making a mental archive of details that I would examine again and again for decades, but a treasury of a fleeting moment was stored in my mind forever.

During the harrowing events of life later on, the memory of looking closely at an often overlooked section of a stream has helped restore tranquility in the midst of chaos.

Whenever the author and editor William Dean Howells broke in a new ink pen, he wrote the name of his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio. One of America’s literary giants, Howells published 35 novels, 35 plays, 34 miscellaneous books, 6 books of literary criticism, 4 books of poetry, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. He shaped the destiny of fellow writers by editing their work for The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. In his book titled A Boy’s Town (1890), Howells wrote that Hamilton “was a town peculiarly adapted for a boy to be a boy in.” Although Howells lived and worked in Boston and New York, as well as having served as a consul in Venice, his pleasant upbringing in Hamilton was his foundation. While I remember the tiny stream that flowed into Big Pine Creek, I understand why Howells wrote the name “Hamilton” as naturally as he took his next breath.