I've been feeling a lot better, so I thought I'd spend some time at my favorite forest preserve, Fullersburg. I usually hang out at the Graue Mill end these days. I like to read there, but I can no longer wander the land to my heart's content because I'm supposed to stay off my feet as much as possible per my podiatrist. So yes, I have seen the fences from where they're restructuring Salt Creek's flow. The mill is closed up as far as I can tell. And as I drove down the back road to the entrance to the other side of Fullersburg, I saw just how different the creek looked. I can't tell for sure, but I think the waterfall is gone.
I remember when I was a kid I walked the narrow ledge just so I could perch on the overhang above the waterfall. I can't do that anymore. My bad leg would never let me get that far. Even if it did, the unfortunate side effect of two decades of hard-as-fuck drinking is that I no longer have balance, and I still get the shakes. As best as I can tell, those things are never going to go away.
But on that day I looked down and saw a giant fish broken on the rocks below, flapping as hard as it could. At first I thought it was a salmon, but there are no salmon in Salt Creek. There are pike, but they're pretty rare. As it turned out, when its struggles slowed, I could tell it was a pike. Saw the little teeth in its opening and closing mouth.
(There's some bass in there and bluegill. Supposedly there's catfish in there, too, but I've never seen one nor evidence of one's existence.)
The waterfall was fucking beautiful. I hope it's still there, and I just can't see it because of the angle of my view.
But today was a fucking gorgeous day, so I said fuck the foot. I'm going to walk around a bit. More than usual, at least. The sun felt good on me. I felt the Mediterranean in me calling. When I was young I hated it, but in my elder years I can see myself all too easily doing something I thought Gramps was crazy for: sitting outside wearing nothing but shorts, soaking in the sun. He did it so much they had to cut melanomas from his head. But it felt amazing today. Like the world finally had a place for me, and I fit into a me-shaped hole there perfectly.
I never feel like I fit in with the world. I always feel like I'm just a tad out of whack with the rest of it, like I raised my arms at the wrong part of the roller coaster. I'm looking at that sentence, and I'm not sure it makes sense. More like a puzzle that lost a piece, and the owner cut a new piece out of cardboard, and that new piece is me. That feels better. Yes.
This is behind the visitor center, where you can see the partial skeleton of a wooly mammoth, if that's your thing. It's mine, so don't be shy. But where you see all that grass? It used to be all creek.
The water used to come up to this wall. It was never deep, but the wildlife used to come up to the wall, too. Frogs, turtles, ducks and an occasional fish. Once upon a time a friend of mine and I wound up in the newspaper because we decided to venture beyond the wall. The creek had dried up at the time, and the ground *looked* sturdy. The creek was just a streamlet, and she wanted to get a close up picture of a duck that was floating there. She sank in the mud, and when I cockily went to rescue her I sank, too. She lost her shoes (wait, not her shoes, she had "borrowed" them from someone), and I wound up giving her a piggyback ride almost the whole mile back to the parking lot. A journalist was doing a softball piece on the place at the time, and we wound up in her article for the Trib. Granted, she made up a pack of lies about us, but it was nice regardless.
Forgive an old man if he's forgotten whether or not he's told that story before. I'll bet I have. And I'll bet my tone was a lot more annoyed by it. But as I said, this man is old, and he is softening at the edges. Possibly feeling a little more mortal than usual due to a health scare that kinda-sorta isn't over. Forgive me the moment of nostalgia.
After enjoying a bit of natural solitude I decided to walk down to the big bridge, and from the middle of it I saw with glee that I could see through the water again. When I was a kid it was a toxic green sludge, almost. When I was in college the water got cleaned up so much I could see clearly to the bottom. Then it got bad again. Not as bad as before. The green had not gone neon yet. Now that they're doing the renovation I can see to the bottom again. Not clearly, not yet, but I take it as a good sign.
But what I really wanted to see was the short bridge that leads to the island in the middle of Salt Creek. I'd hoped that they finally opened it back up, because I wanted to walk the path that goes around the island, maybe hang out at the rest stop a little bit.
Motherfucker. The bridge is gone, and with it any chance I will have of exploring that island ever again. I looked around, and if I had two good legs I could probably get over there. The creek dried up on this end of the island. All that's there now is a tiny little swamp.
If I didn't need this leg brace to get around, I think I could cross the rough ground and the tiny bit of swamp to get there, but I really don't want to say fuck my foot on that one. The odds of breaking it further here are just too high. If it breaks any more than it already has, I'll become Pegleg Johnny. Because yes, if I do lose the foot, I do want a pegleg. I probably wouldn't be able to balance well on it, but it would be cool for maybe five minutes. Maybe a little longer if I'm going to roar along to "The Curse of Captain Morgan" by Alestorm.
It seems that every time I walk around Fullersburg, there is something vastly different. But as I sat on a bench looking up at the cathedral the trees made above me, I couldn't help but think, No matter how badly they try to change this place, they can never take away its beauty. And it is still fucking beautiful. The world is moving on, but there is still beauty to behold.
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