Named for one of northeastern North Carolina’s early Indian tribes, wide enough at places to be a river by western standards, The Creek has always held for me an air of mystery. Grandmother owned and had lived at the Creek Farm in the late eighteen hundreds. The first white settlers poled or paddled their way westward using such deep water highways, branching headwaters of the Chowan, the Tar, and Meherrin Rivers, birthed mostly in Virginia and flowing southeastward toward the great sounds and, ultimately, the sea. Their maps reflected, phonetically, the native names, and this stream is shown variously as Pottacasi, Potacacy, and as titled. It marked the boundary, the back side of the Benthal Farm, divided between two sons by my great-great grandfather in 1821.

But this is neither geography nor history. Rather, it is a series of impressions made upon me, first as a boy of ten or so, and continuing spasmodically, as I, with some infrequency, visited with my folks, meaning my mother’s kin. Always I was drawn to this stretch of black water, stained by the tannin from bark and root and leaves, meandering (for there’s no better word) beneath those mammoth hardwoods: gum and water oak, tupelo and bald cypress, before the day of chain saw. Of course, when I first recall actually being on the creek bank, sometime in the early twenties, there had been some timbering. Stumps as wide as a wagon wheel marked the logging that had been done with eight-foot, cross-cut saws, pulled and pushed eccentrically by strong black shoulders. Undoubtedly, some stumps survived from slave days. Others were more recent. But there had been no clear-cutting, and in the rich, black bottom, as the jungle went, so it returned. Cypress knees, like Martians with small heads and broad bottoms, waded in the shallows. Vines of grape, large as a leg, sinuously bound the forest to the land. Greenbriar mimicked the grape, a wrapping twine of barbed wire, untidily securing the undergrowth into a near impenetrable vertical matting. In summer, heaven above the creek was green, a panoply of intertwining leaf and branch. Winter’s defoliation let through a weak and a pallid sun, not warm enough to melt the river ice along the banks. There was the miasma of the swamp and a silence almost frightening to a boy reared mostly on the city’s pavement, and like the Cockney, within sound, in my case, of trolley, not Bow Bells.

Early on, I’d go to the farm with Granddaddy Jenkins, most frequently in the spoke-wheeled Overland, chauffeured by one of my aunts. When the red clay hill near Menola got rain-rutted axle deep, Ole Spot, the pacing mule (who lived to age thirty-six) would be hitched to the buggy, and off we’d go. I got to drive, and it was on these occasions that Granddaddy would check the field hands, and then, taking the reins to negotiate the rough, narrow track from the main house, would take me to the creek. He gruffly pretended he wanted to see how the timber was growing, but I always thought he really felt his namesake ought to be exposed to his almost fanatical love of the land. He was right. It took.

There was the time when Uncle Willie shepherded his coterie of nephews to fish for red-fin pike. At that age, about twelve, I’d never heard of the pike’s first cousin, fourth-removed (as we might say in the South), the fabled Muskellunge. It was forty years later before I actually met the Muskie at the opposite end of the state in the cold waters of a river in the Smokies. But the smallest of the four members of the pickerel family is a beauty. Black-green to match the waters where he lives, he bedecks himself with pendant ruby fins. Slim as a snake and foot-long though he may be, a stringer-full to a twelve-year-old is a whole wide world of joy.

I remember that later on, those same boys, then college-age, took themselves in summertime to seek adventure on the creek. Committing, as the statute puts it, “temporary larceny” of somebody’s cypress skiff, we swam, buck-naked, in the primal wilderness, fancied ourselves renascent Tarzans and shouted against the silence in sheer exuberance. The skiff’s owner had wisely, but vainly, taken his paddle with him, but a couple of boards from an even older boat served as paddles for the moment. We had quieted some, perhaps, I like to think, in belated recognition and awe at the cathedral atmosphere in which we found ourselves. It was then that a native of the region decided to join us. Swimming purposefully in our direction, and there was no mistaking his intention, came a real, live, cottonmouth moccasin, determined to join us in our cruise. Now my cousins, to a man, would fight a bear with a switch, but they neither then nor now want any part of a snake, especially one who wants to share a boat. And if his open mouth shows chalky white, he can have the boat! Preparing to repel boarders, at least that one, my crew promptly fired away their missiles, our makeshift, but only, paddles. The snake took umbrage at this inhospitable reception, fortunately, and sought a sulking place under a brush pile on our starboard shore. But I was brash, and a bit of a showoff, and over the strenuous objections of my compatriots, hand-propelled our doughty craft to his lair, and amid the cheers, dispatched our attacker with my trusty broadsword—hell, it really was only a handy oak limb. I just got carried away there for a minute. I did, however, skin him out, and sixty inches from nose to tail, he graced my college wall during my sophomore year.

It was only long after those forays, made in halcyon days when the doing of something was important, that I realized that the feeling was the essence of the outdoors. I remember now, in and along that creek, the shadows of the long-nosed gar, three or four feet in length, stacked beneath the surface like cord wood. Then I didn’t know, or stop to think, how they and the grindle and their fellow resident, the snapping turtle, irrefutably bound us to the past, to the ice age and beyond, to our mutual beginning. Nor did I hear the muted whistle of the wood duck, jet-propelling herself through the pin oaks to a hollow in a silver beech. A pileated woodpecker jackhammered a home in a dying forest pine, almost unnoticed. In the water, jacks—Eastern chain pickerel—seemed as long as my arm, but they were there only to be caught, not to lift my spirit. A banded kingfisher, surveying his hunting territory from a broken limb high in a blackgum, was himself a target for my little .22, a temporary challenge and a sorry victory.

Gaynelle Keene, a Meherrin descendant, in the Meherrin at the mouth of the Potecasi.

I value the growth, the maturity, that comes with age. The increased sensitivity to things around us “out there” simply imposes an obligation to pass it on. There are now two generations beyond my boyhood on The Creek. I have tried to see that they too have their creeks, and with them, the insights, the experiences, the impressions and the love of things outdoors. I don’t write “how to” stuff. There are enough—too many, really—technicians among the outdoor writers. I’d like to join those few who take us back to the primordial recognition of man and his place in things—and a small place it is—like Potecasi.