Life on the Mill Creek Part 1

Life on the Mill Creek Part 1

Before becoming a world renowned author, Mark Twain, then known as Samuel Clemens earned his living piloting boats up and down the Mississippi River.  Life on the Mississippi is his memoir of those days.  Not too unlike Twain a body of water played an integral part in my life.   Since I don’t have a big publisher standing by to print my memoir the plan is to share various stories in serial form about my life and times on the stream that flowed quite literally in my backyard.  Thus I present the start of my own memoir, Life on the Mill Creek.

In the spring of 1848 less than a year after the Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley John Neff dug out the millstones he had hauled half way across the continent and built a flour mill at the mouth of one of six canyons in the Salt Lake Valley.  The establishment of that mill gave the canyon and the stream flowing through it an eponymous name…Mill Creek.  Over time there has been some disagreement on whether it is one word or two other than that very little had changed along the banks of the stream through the years.  Civilization grew up along those banks but the rocky little waterway remained mostly unscathed by the encroaching population during the years of my youth.  

Whenever I "ran away" from home the rocky little stream was my escape, the place where my affinity for water was formed and dreams of pirate booty and sandy beaches fueled my imagination in a land locked city far from the ocean's shores.  What better way to cool off on a hot summer day than to plop down in the stream bed and let the water flow over you. Water which only minutes earlier were the remnants of the winter snow pack high in the Rocky Mountains now headed towards the Great Salt Lake. Hours were spent inside the culverts which run under the roadways, pouring over the real treasures found along the creek bed; discarded men’s magazines which had been left, I presume, by older boys who had also discovered the isolation found only along the banks of the flowing water.

Being a guy means the world is your urinal and my friends and I would often find ourselves competing against each other to see who could pee furthest across the bucolic stream.  One of the guys was quite simply more endowed than the rest of us...so he had an advantage in these contests but it never deterred our efforts to span the waterway with our own streams.

The placid little stream would often become a raging torrent during the height of the spring runoff causing property damage and a threat to lives. Government agencies soon stepped in and altered the stream bed in an effort they called flood control but we called it the first water park in the county.  This new recreational outlet led to many other adventures which played out along the banks of my creek, adventures which will be spelled out in more detail in future postings. 

By birth I am a Leo, a fire sign but I have a lot of water in me.  My wife is a Pisces yet she has a lot of fire in her soul.  She is the yin to my yang.  Angie introduced me to another watery haven where we escape as often as we can.  Southern Florida has become our home away from home.  We sit on the beach watching the giant cruise ships traveling along the coastal waterway. The faint sound of steel drums hammering out their calypso beat wafts over the waves.  We have discussed taking a cruise ourselves.  But I am not a fan of these floating hotels.  I prefer to get down into the water and feel the tides as they pound shoreward.  It is there, enveloped in the tidal ebb and flow that I am transported back to my youth and those halcyon days played out along the banks of the Mill Creek.