That Was Our Land
Don Krumpos · Childhood · Family · Memoir · Place · Stomping grounds
Every year our parents gave us new boundaries.
At five and six we could only go to the end of the driveway. The next year we could go out onto the road, but only in front of the driveway, to get a taste of the free world. By eight we could go down to Conard’s, the neighbor farmer, and no farther.
When we were with other adults, though, we could go as far as they would go with us.
Wequiock Falls was about two miles from our house. When we were small we only went a few times, with our parents, in the car, and looked at it from a safe distance.
Then we learned to ride our bikes. My parents did not bicycle much. But one year we went with Dad’s sisters, Aunt Carol and Aunt Kim, down the hill to Wequiock Falls, with a packed lunch. It seemed so far. They seemed much younger than our parents and more adventurous, and we actually walked down the stairs and got as close as we could to the falls themselves.
Riding back was so hard. It was a lot of uphill, and on the big hill we got off and walked our bikes.
Then there was the year we could go by ourselves.
It was Aaron and Jason Schaut, my sister Helen, my cousin Jimmy, and me. Our parents insisted on the importance of crossing Highway 57, the two-lane, and being sure there was absolutely no traffic. They gave us a couple of dollars for treats at Craanen’s Grocery on Bay Settlement Road.
This time there were no adults, so we could scale down the side of the ravine. We found an opening under the railing and a slope that was not completely vertical, with branches and roots to hang onto, and we did our best GI Joe moves on the way down and helped Helen some of the way. I was always somewhere in a story, some combination of Star Wars or GI Joe or a pioneer at the edge of the known world, and that slope was the edge.
We did not stop at the edge of the falls. We went underneath it, as far as we could go, crawling along the ledge, jamming our feet into the clay to make steps that would hold for a moment before they slid away.
Under the falls was a magical place. The shelf of rock hung over the top of you. On the south side and the north side, roots came through the rock, and water trickled out between the stones. And there was a lot of the blue-gray clay, damp and musty. Marvelous stuff. You could press a handprint into it, or lob a glob at your friend. In winter it was a wonderland, because every one of those trickles became an icicle and the whole underside turned into an ice cave.
The fossils were in the rock all around us. To me they were nothing new. I saw them at Red Banks, at Bay Shore Park, at all the places I grew up along the escarpment. Years later I learned that the man who knew this rock best, Steven Dutch, was the one who taught the geology class I took in a fifth-grade summer school.
I’m sorry for kicking the clay and climbing there. Even as a kid, the place became sacred to me, and it only grew as I grew. Now I know better.
We knew this would be a place we would keep coming back to, as much as we could.
Later that year we braved the tunnel.
It runs under Bay Settlement Road, west, and carries the creek down from the falls. It smelled of damp concrete, and it seemed so dangerous to go through. You just had to suck it up and know you were going to get wet. The tunnel was the portal. Going through it was like going into another world. It turned us into wild creatures. We came out the other end into a magical land.
On the other side was the pool, red with iron, and we swam in it. The little falls that came out of the tunnel into the pool showered us. We found crayfish. When it was deep enough, we jumped in.
We didn’t know where the creek went. Each time we went a little farther down, only as far as we could and still get home in time so our parents would not worry.
West of the pool the ravine was still high. There was a big clay cliff with a vine we could climb up. Every year the vine was still there.
Sometimes we walked in the creek, hopping from stone to stone. Sometimes we kept to the side and forged a trail. Usually some of each. In spring it was a lot harder to be in the creek, because the water was so much higher.
It was wet all the way down. The smell of wet wood, rotted wood, and mushrooms. We collected the mushrooms and ate them too. In spring there were flowers everywhere along the ravine. I didn’t know their names then. I picked them for Grandma, which I now know I shouldn’t have, and she was delighted to get anything from us. She put them in a little glass of water.
Just past the cliff was a dip where the ice formed. One year, only one, it made an ice cavern: the ice froze over the top, the water underneath dried out and hollowed away, and climbing into it was going into a subterranean world with an ice ceiling. One winter I saw a white ermine near that spot. In summer, when the dip was dried out, a lot of cool roots came down into it.
Then the creek curved, and one side of the curve was filled in with rocks, as if a farmer had piled them there to stop the erosion. Past that was a shed or a barn, some farm machinery, the ruins of a thresher, and a driving path through a shallow part of the creek. The farmer must have used it as his machine shed. It was more open there, so we were careful not to be seen.
There were ruins all over my stomping grounds, and exploring them was one of my favorite things.
After that the ravine got higher again, and up on one side was a meadow with the most perfect grasses to lie in, and wildflowers. That was where we stopped and rested and had our picnic.
Past the meadow the creek curved back and forth, and there was a place where we swung across on a vine. Then it flattened out, and we were level with the lower part of the escarpment. We called it the Ledge. I don’t know where that name came from, but I loved adventuring along it, from UWGB all the way up to Bay Shore Park and all the places in between. At Wequiock School we learned it was the Niagara Escarpment, and my second-grade teacher, Ms. Bugni, said it was the start of Niagara Falls. So I imagined the water I swam in traveling all the way to New York to fall over the big falls someday. Which is not far from true. I didn’t think much of the escarpment itself as a kid. I came to appreciate it later.
Then one year, when we were old enough, ten or eleven, our parents trusted us to be gone all the daylight hours. That was the year we went all the way down. Once we were even with Nicolet Drive, the road my Grandma lived on, we went straight until we reached it.
The first time, I realized: oh, this is where Jimmy brought me smelt fishing. I recognized it from the other side. It was all one thing. The falls, the tunnel, the iron pool, the smelt water, the point: one creek, running from near our house to the bay.
That was as far as we went for a couple of years. Grandma’s house was just a mile north, so as we got older we would go there and have her drive us home.
Later, Jimmy and I went on into Point Sable. It was a labyrinth of what seemed like a lot of creeks winding into each other, impossible to cross without a boat, and much of it we traveled in Jimmy’s boat. On foot we got as far as we could along the southern rim, a stone beach where cool things washed up: bones, and turtle shells to collect.
We spent a lot of time on the north side of the point too, because that was where Jimmy lived, and some family friends, and we would ramble through the swamp. But that is a different story. That seemed like a different land.
When we could drive, adventures like that got less interesting than driving fast on the back roads. But we still came to the falls, and we came in winter, and that was when I saw the ice castle that forms there. When I say we, it was probably me and Aaron, my best friend at the time.
There was never a family story about the falls, or a name for it. The only story was the one I made up myself, being there, in my own magical playground. And there was never anyone around. Once in a while a tourist would look at the falls from the road, or from the top of the bridge. Never anyone west of Bay Settlement Road. There may have been a tiny bit of bad graffiti in the tunnel, but nothing like now. Now if I go, it is rare if there isn’t someone there. That sums up most things for me these days.
That was our land.