The Amazon and The Creek

The Amazon and The Creek
Samantha Audet
It was the last day of school. My classmates and I had already stood on the delicate metal risers in the gym watching the proud faces of our parents. We already heard the words of our teachers, of our principal. We had already felt the butterflies in our stomachs. We were, after all, graduating from the 6th grade. It was a big deal, or so they said. My classmates and I would be attending middle school next year. Instead of one large class of approximately 20 students we would be given the responsibility of finding our own classes with the possibility and probability of new faces in each one.

What we knew:
1.New students
2. Lockers
3. Electives

What we didn’t know but would soon discover:
1. Popular kids
2. Boys
3. Acne.

Regardless of what lay in the unknown, that dark cloud of what was to come excited us, and so we soaked up the ceremony of graduation from the 6th grade and from elementary school.
Now rewind. We are back to the topic of the last day of school. As I have already said, my classmates and I had already experienced the thrill of our graduation and were now playing a game of patience. Finally, we had reached the end of the tunnel with the light in sight. The teachers were about as anxious as the students and had left us to our own devices. Some students were lucky enough to have parents who excused them from class. My friends and I were among the unlucky ones. There were about six of us that day. Two of which were my best friends.

Jesse: redhead, tall, cute, cynical.
Anna: brunette, tall, know-it-all.

There were also three others…

Caroline: brunette, teacher’s daughter, hooligan.
Marika: blonde, exchange student from Estonia, natural genius.
Jessie (not to be confused with Jesse): brunette, quiet, also a genius.

So here is our cast. As the character description dictates, it was Caroline who lost at the waiting game, and consequently made losers out of all of us. The teacher had left the room and hadn’t returned for some time, together we all agreed with Caroline to follow her outside to the playground. Well besides Anna, who was afraid of getting in trouble if the teacher returned to find us missing. Her concerns were ignored and she followed with a pout.
The asphalt was wet from the rain that had plagued the Northern Virginia Area for weeks. There were soggy earthworms in puddles, pools of water on the swings, and damp woodchips. It only took about 15 minutes before the splashing in puddles began to bore our young and ADD-like attention span.
Once again, Caroline nominated the idea to explore the woods that lay just behind the tidy little elementary school. Marika, an avid fan of Caroline’s, quickly agreed. The rest of us shortly followed except of course for Anna who at first protested. When the rest of us started walking without her she decided that trouble was a better alternative than being a loner.
A set of old, steep, wood stairs that led down into the woods first greeted us. There was grass and weeds that had seeped their way into the crack of the stairs, and made our legs itch. It was a long trek down those steep wood stairs, especially for legs as short as ours. When we reached the bottom the smell of the woods was almost overwhelming. The rain had made it dank and soggy but it was not enough to take away from its pure beauty.
From the stairs was a gravel path that, not too far, led us to a quaint bridge across the creek. The gravel made a comforting crunch under our feet as we struggled to contain our excitement. We didn’t last long. One by one, me being the first, we ran to the bridge and hung our heads over the side to watch the fast moving water beneath us.

What we did know:
o There was a lot of water.
What we didn’t know:
o There was a flash flood warning and consequently was the reason why there was so much water.
Once again our young explorer/daredevil/ completely insane, ADD, going to live in a crack house, companion Caroline noticed the sandbars littering the creek like tiny islands. Before we could even fathom cause for debate, she dashed down the trampled paths parallel to the bridge and disappeared behind brush and trees. Well, that left little to no alternative options to the rest of us, mostly because when you’re as young as we were you’re always following the fearless leader.
It didn’t take long for the rest of us to catch up to our silently elected tour guide. The scrawny dark haired Amazon had already crossed the sandbar and was wading her feet in the water. She was giggling like a loon. It only took a slight tilt of her head to catch sight of us behind her. Today, I can practically see those tiny gears turning as she thought about how next to portray her fearlessness. In one fluid motion she catapulted herself into the current, completely submerged. She resurfaced, completely drenched, and exploded in laughter.
At this point we had blindly followed this head case into every ridiculous situation she had offered to us. Why stop now? Mere minutes later we were all wading upstream, in a flash flooded creek, with barely our heads above water. The muddied creek was full of pitfalls including deep holes, sharp rocks, and, well, fish. Time escaped us and honestly to this day I don’t know how long we spent swimming in that ridiculously strong current ridden creek. A few of us had received a few war wounds from our “man vs. wild” escapade. It was most likely at this point that we decided to abandon creek and search for a way back to the school.
Climbing out of the creek proved to be as difficult as wading up it. A good 50% of our bodies were covered in mud. The mixture of completely sopping wet clothes and caked mud stains gave us the spitting image of midget mud men. Needless to say, we received a few look backs on our way to the school. No one could ignore the grins sprawled luxuriously across our faces.
Our parent’s were of course completely dumbfounded. If we couldn’t control our excitement before we certainly weren’t going to start now. Our high-pitched 11-year-old voices squawked every detail of our adventure up the creek. This is when what we didn’t know but would soon find out became what we did know. Naturally, we weren’t going to get off without a lecture about wading in creeks during a flash flood warning. And we most certainly didn’t.