by Rick Van Noy

On the map, they have many names: streams, rivulets, branches, tributaries, runs, and brooks. In spring they can be labeled freshets. But when you are talking about playing in a “small body of running water,” only “creek” will do. And when you hop across stones or hunt crayfish in a creek, you call that creek walking.

After school one breezy spring day, I asked my seven-year-old son Sam what he wanted to do. Fly a kite? Ride a bike? Go to the creek?

“Yeah. With nets!”

Everyone else in the neighborhood was putting on roller skates or jumping on scooters. But Sam’s mind was already been made up. He’d rather test his balance on mossy, wet rocks than on wheels.

Creek walking is not officially sanctioned as an after school sport, though it requires some of the same skills and teaches some of the same values.

First, you need agility and balance. You have to be graceful as a heron to walk over slippery rocks. And while a parent or coach can point out that a particular mossy rock is slippery, kids learn best by figuring them out on their own. If they fall, they learn to pay attention to those conditions that made the fall happen.

Creek walking also requires technique, and there are basically two kinds of creek walkers, the wet and the dry. Dry creek walkers try to cross without dipping a toe. They treat creek walking like horizontal rock climbing: plan the route, look for the good hold. Wet creek walkers are less interested in what lies on top of the rock (a secure surface) than what lies underneath (moving animals), and they could care less about keeping dry.

It always begins so innocently for us. We are there to see the spring wildflowers, the bloodroot, spring beauty, and the little Dutchman’s breeches. Soon the kids are tossing stones in the creek. But then there’s a particular rock to pick up, and a salamander under that one, and so a toe must get wet to catch it. Soon the whole leg is in. Eventually, as Norman Maclean wrote, all things merge into one, and a creek runs through your shoes.

If you want to catch critters, you have to know which rocks to turn over, and how not to disturb the upstream sediment and cloud your hole, and where the crayfish are likely to gather. My kids have tried several techniques: the patient one is to stick the net behind the crayfish and move something in front of it. Crayfish swim backwards and usually into your net. But the kids have also mastered the art of the quick splash and scoop.

You don’t need much in the way of equipment for creek walking. Old sneakers keep out some of the pebbles and help protect your toes. Your big box store sells a triangular net useful for its flat tip (for laying on the creek bed) and rounded corners (for digging out spindly crawdads).

Finally, creek walking requires teamwork and good sportsmanship. You must learn, for example, that your little sister also wants to hold that salamander (and that you shouldn’t yell at her when it slithers away), and that you should not cloud someone else’s hole by walking upstream and releasing the silt. You must learn, too, that when the game is over it is time to go home, even if you haven’t caught that last minnow. Screaming and stamping your feet only shows poor sportsmanship.

But there’s a problem with taking up creek walking as a recreational sport. There simply aren’t enough playing fields.

On one of our many trips up Interstate 81, we once pulled off in a little town to stretch our legs. We wanted let the kids out to play, so we found a playground with a log structure-part fortress, part wooden castle. But nearby was a clean flowing stream, and kids opted to play in it. The results of such an experiment could probably be repeated across the nation-kids would readily choose a good creek over expensive playground equipment-but too often we spend money elsewhere than on water quality. According to a the most recent “State of Our Rivers” report, over 2,166 miles of streams in Virginia are “impaired.” Almost half of all Virginia waterways are not fit the play or swim in.

Down at the creek, most people walk right by, Mountain Dew in hand. A few even seem to frown disapprovingly. Creek walking is not a spectator sport. Only participants enjoy it.

On another adventure, the kids found a milk container sliced in half. At the bottom was a loop of duct tape, sticky side up, dotted with pennies to be used as ballast. And at the back of the ship were taped two cardboard tubes, probably flag posts. The kids thought they had found treasure. Soon, everything they found on their trip became part of the sea wreck. Two small pieces of plywood must be from the decking, and a galvanized fence post could be its bowsprit. Creek walking develops qualities that organized sports may not: imagination, discovery, spontaneous play.

At the essence of creek walking is movement. Though creeks may flow over rocks that are sedentary, your kids will not be when they are near. One day I enticed my daughter and her friend to go to the creek by suggesting that we take Barbie for a swim. Barbie shot the rapids several times. There was much screaming, but brother Sam was ready with the net to rescue her from the maelstrom. Meanwhile, they also built dams. Sam said he wasn’t so much interested in “holding back the water” as in “making interesting flows”-waterfalls, ripples, air bubble eddies. The kids used rocks to create the structure and leaves to patch the cracks, but water found the weakness, and Barbie, having been laid in the water to rest against the rocks, dove through. After several more rapids and a vigorous chase to rescue her, the girls placed her on a rock to dry and to be “kissed by a prince,” an event unlikely to happen unless Prince Charming was disguised as a frog.

On yet another adventure we kept score. On a football field stretch, from bridge to bridge, we netted 22 crayfish, 17 minnows (of those, at least three different species), and 4 salamanders. But we let everything go. We once tried to put some newts in a tank, but we found one dry and lifeless among the dust behind the bookshelf. Creek walking can teach fair play. Nobody needs to win or lose, least of all the critters.

Radford City High School biology teacher Frank Taylor has helped us take our creek walking to a new level. On a muggy Fourth of July day, we left the celebration in the park and took to the creek. The kids scooped a netful of pebbles out of the riffles and scattered them in a brownie pan, sifting through them as if panning for gold. Eventually, tiny invertebrate insects and crustaceans came into focus. Through the Save our Stream program, we learned what species are indicators of good water quality. We saw mayflies and their aerodynamic shape that helps push down on the rock surface like a race car. If we had a magnifying glass, we could spot the hairs they use to catch food in their comb-like mouths. We saw the caterpillar-like caddis fly and the yellow stonefly, the latter doing something like push-ups to bring oxygen into its gills. They learned that these species depend on clean water to survive, and that there is a world underneath rocks: casings of hatched larvae and tracks from the gilled snail. From creek walking, they learn about how this creek will blend with that river. And that river into the next. And how pollution can end up in the creek, and that if there’s too much of it, these species will disappear. Along the banks, they have seen cups, bottles and bags, so “pollution” is not so abstract. One day they will walk upstream-all the way to the creek’s source. They will imagine the journey that a small canoe will take, how it will travel west toward the New River, then north where it will join the Gauley to become the Kanawha. And then west along the Ohio and down the great Mississippi past New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico.

Each time we return to the creek something has changed. The seasons change, the banks change, even the well-placed rocks of the dams move and or are moved by someone or something. Unlike other sports, the playing surface shifts-unstructured and loose, free-flowing and without bounds. In the morning we sometimes see a heron and in the sunny afternoon the water glows with the colors of the sky. Each time we go to the creek, we are changed too. As much as the kids catch in the creek, they are also caught by it. Several years from now they may travel to places far away from this watershed, but for now all they need are two feet and a creek. They catch life in this creek. They are creek walkers. They walk in their neighborhood creek. •