My first memory of Troublesome Creek might be the elephants. But novelty triggers memory formation, and all the other background days may have passed without firing the synapses that weave the darkest and brightest strings into the fabric of the past. 

As the commander of the local American Legion post, my dad managed the legion grounds, where circuses and carnivals would set up. He was wont to bring some of the workers home for dinner, so this little pitcher’s big ears got to hear vagabond stories while my mom got to do extra cooking. The camaraderie with the crews meant I got to roam around watching the tents and rides go up and come down, and I got to tag along to watch the elephants drink from Troublesome Creek which runs behind the legion field. Time stood still as tiny me stood in awe just a few feet from the giants with tree-trunk legs and archway toes. I was mesmerized as they siphoned water with their swinging trunks, first to curl into their mouths, then to playfully spray on each other. The elephants were anomalous in my world, but they were only a part of the intricate web of life I observed growing up on the creek—skating water striders, bright green luna moths, striped garter snakes, diving kingfishers, so many wonders.  

My mom had a soft spot for animals, but she had a family to feed, as well as the occasional traveling magician or entire membership from a visiting legion post. She sold produce by the roadside, hard-earned cash that manifested as track shoes, clarinets for band, and school clothes from Magic Mart over in Hazard. Summer evenings we’d sit in the growing dark in the corn patch a few feet from the creekbanks, listening for the snap of the traps she’d set at dusk to protect our garden from muskrats, so what had to be done would be over with quickly. 

The creek changed annually, the sand bars, riffles, and pools shifting with spring floods. Its unsettled nature may be how it came to be named “Troublesome,” as there’s not much room to spare in the first place in the narrow mountain valleys of eastern Kentucky. One year this meandering course created the legendary but short-lived “deep hole,” where my uncle and I would fish with river cane poles and scavenge for the magical fruit of pawpaw trees. 

When our bottom flooded, the legion grounds would flood too, and we’d drive the four miles along Route 160 to the post, the creek lapping at but never overtopping the road. Particularly high floods would submerge the outdoor cinderblock oven where the world’s largest gingerbread man was baked every September for Hindman’s Gingerbread Festival, but the water never reached the white wooden building where the blue and gold American Legion Post 131 flag was displayed behind the Friday night bingo wheel. 

The spring floods were expected, stressful, but never terrifying. They’d wash our makeshift bridge downstream, and wash someone else’s to us. When the neighbors on the hill on the other side of the creek went all out and put in a fancy bridge with steel beams, the wood soon washed away but the beams stayed. Those beams became inspiration for hours of pretend tight rope walking and balance beam twirling, along with stern admonishments from my mom to stay off them. Those beams never became a lasting bridge, and in high school they became my “thinking spot.”  I’d watch the water flow and write bad poetry about trees, clouds, the cute grocery baggers at Casey’s IGA, and the high school DJs at WKCB, establishments that also sat along the creek, marking the east and west perimeters of “town.” 

The creek is the ribbon that ties the whole community together, the element everyone has in common; even the newspaper is called Troublesome Creek Times. When I think of families, churches, schools, or businesses, I think of their position in relation to the creek. When my uncle died, the one who taught me to fish and crafted me a bow and a deer skin quiver full of blunt arrows, neighbors all along the creek came over. They sat on the porch with us, bringing homemade butterscotch pies and store-bought danishes, lingering into the night and watching the bats come out, as the whole world condensed into fog and the riotous chorus of spring peepers.  

We had a creek bank garden and a hillside garden, said “hillside” being across the creek and just a few feet up. But those few feet were enough to ensure that if the floods were high enough to take out the creek bank garden, we’d still have jars of half runner beans, silver queen corn, tomato juice, beets, and mixed pickles for the winter. When summer days were too dry for too long, my older sisters and I would carry milk jugs of water from the creek to the hillside garden, quarter of a jug per plant. 

Our sewage straight piped into the creek. This was just a fact of life, a baseline shared by all the houses along the banks. We still ate turtles from the creek and still played in it. It wasn’t a source of shame, but looking uncool sailing a margarine tub boat sure was, a poignant end to my days as a carefree kid.  

The first time I remember being self-conscious, a crimson red string in the fabric of memory, I had ridden the school bus home the first day of my freshman year, changed into play clothes, and headed down to the creek. I was wading downstream with a neighbor kid, racing our boats with sticks, when we turned a bend and encountered cute senior boys fishing off the bridge. Mortified, that was the last day my Country Crock vessel ever set sail. 

The creek was my geography, my lifeline, my pastime, my balm. When my dad died my junior year, I spent hours at the creek. Struggling with overwhelm my senior year brought me to tears, and I slipped outside one afternoon and sat on the high school steps, enveloped by the hum of cicadas and soaking in the silvery green of the sycamores growing along the creek. Focusing on the trees soothed me and reminded me that nature is bigger and more eternal than the ups and downs of my daily life. Years later I would encounter a reflection from writer Thich Nhat Hanh, “The dandelion is one member of your community of friends. It is there, quite faithful, keeping your smile for you,” and I would think back to that afternoon on the Knott Central steps when the trees were wise friends. 

Summers home from college, once the sun dropped over the hill, I would run countless circles around the community track on the banks, restless to be out in the “real world,” unappreciative of how precious that time would end up being. One wet night little boys were splatting frogs against the track, and splatting my heart along with them. The first time I jogged past them I asked them nicely to stop. The second time I stopped and tried explaining the ecological importance of frogs. The third time I told them frogs were protected species, and the sheriff was going to come cart them off to jail, a stone’s throw from where we were standing. Only that last made-up point had the intended effect.  

No matter where I’ve lived, from Alaska to Arizona, I dream about the creek. Sometimes in my dreams it holds tropical marine fish, sometimes abundant beds of freshwater mussels and mudpuppies. Sometimes the water is teal and rapid like rivers in the Pacific Northwest, sometimes it’s swirling and so toxic I’m afraid of falling in, sometimes coal mines loom as high as the Rockies above the banks. The details shift, but it’s always the creek behind my house. I lost my mom to undetected cancer my last semester of college, and in my favorite dreams, we are standing together on a wooden bridge over the creek.   

I moved out west after graduating from Berea College and returned to playing in creeks. I worked as a wildlife technician, elated that I could actually get paid to survey streams and wetlands for tadpoles and salamanders. As an environmental educator, I taught teenagers about watershed restoration, being certain to assure them that playing in creeks is a very cool pursuit. 

When visiting Kentucky to see my sisters one year, we drove Daniel Boone Parkway east to the old homeplace. I wanted to find the cedar we had planted as a seedling on my sixteenth birthday. Our yard was an impenetrable jungle. Despite my sisters’ warnings that I was going to get eaten alive by snakes, I tunneled through the tangled wall of greenbrier and box elder, intent on finding the plants that would give me my bearings, the house long gone. Thank goodness for that eastern red cedar, now 30 feet tall—without it, I wouldn’t have been able to find where the corner of the house had been or to find the mock orange that grew under my bedroom window, or the snowball bush that was the backdrop for all our family photos.  

Our homeplace sits just two miles from Hindman Settlement School, just over the hill from the orange steeple of Ivis Bible Church. When I would get off the school bus at the public library, I always wondered about the distinctive settlement school buildings. My dad would leave his afternoon post on the bench in front of Francis Family Drug, home of the soda fountain extraordinaire, and pick me up at the library, my arms laden with treasures like The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and the kids’ version of The Canterbury Tales. I never knew much about the Settlement School, except that Director Mullins drove a van full of us up to tour Berea College during our senior year of high school.   

While I was living in Oregon, I was at a meeting on strengthening regulations to protect communities from flooding and coal pollution when I met West Virginian Jack Spadaro. As a young engineer, Jack investigated the deadly 1972 Buffalo Creek sludge disaster. Just like me, he grew up playing in a creek, and we became fast friends. At a café in Portland, he raved about Hindman Settlement School and as soon as he got home, he sent me a box of James Still’s books. James Still was just a name to me, one of the men in hats my dad held court with in the afternoons on the bench outside the drugstore. Starting with River of Earth, I read all the books he sent, and Jack and I pondered if as a young man he, Mr. Still, and my dad, known as Smiley, ever sat on that bench at the same time. Jack conducted investigations on behalf of injured miners, and was in Hindman often, testifying at the courthouse. 

That courthouse is where my dad met my mom in 1949. She had come downtown from Rock Fork for “Court Day,” the day each month when the county court convened. Court days provided opportunities for people to gather and socialize, and for travelling snake oil salesmen to peddle tins of pungent black salve and vials of kerosene-red “atomic fire penetrating oil.”  The story goes that mom was wearing her Sunday dress, her black hair pin-curled, leaning against the stately building with one foot on the stone wall. My dad, a travelling vaudeville entertainer and snake oil salesman himself, told her he was a famous country music singer, Smilin’ Frank. He had a convertible, she had the prettiest eyes he’d ever seen, and the rest is history.  

When I was out west, exploring snowy volcanic mountains, rugged coastlines, and towering evergreen forests, I missed the beauty and diversity of Appalachia, the black walnuts and shagbark hickories, snapping turtles and whippoorwills, groundhogs and porch-step skinks. I was “dragging these roots like a bag of bones,” as the Jelly Roll lyrics go– “where I’m from won’t let me go.” 

Now I’m back in rural Kentucky, gardening in the clay soil, growing turkey craw and greasy grit green beans, sorting through tangled threads of memory. Jack asked me on the phone recently if I’m going to move back to Oregon and then we both blurted out “these prisoning hills” from James Still’s most famous poem, “Heritage.” I tell him the honeysuckle vine I moved from my mom’s yard to mine has wrapped itself around my ankles here on the banks of the Cumberland River. Our winding conversation turns to books where the landscape is itself a primary character—All the Living, My Antonia, The Seed Keeper, The Old Man, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Return of the Native, too many to name, too many to read in a lifetime because ultimately we all absorb and become our landscape.  

Not having changed much, I periodically drive down to McKay’s Books in Knoxville, leaving with armfuls of used books. It was there that I picked up The Book Woman of Troublesome 

Creek and learned for the first time about the Pack Horse Library Project that ran from 1935-1943, delivering books into the hills and hollows. My mom would’ve been five to thirteen during those years and I tear up wondering if she ever got to hold any of those precious books. 

In the 2022 floods, not just the hillside garden but our entire house would’ve been underwater. The community center where we could watch movies on Saturdays, the public swimming pool, the Ben Franklin five and dime, Conley and Slone’s clothing where we got Easter dresses, Thacker and Grigsby where we paid the long-distance telephone bill, every single place I remember would have flooded, even the bridge downtown which felt so high as a kid. Exploring our homeplace in the aftermath, the entire tangle had been ripped out of the sandy soil and replaced by knotweed. I made my way down to the creek and was thrilled to see a turtle, this beleaguered creek still harboring troves of life. Problems like disposing of garbage and sewage in the creek are mostly resolved now, but there are deadlier problems from the mix of a warming atmosphere holding more moisture and stripped hills absorbing less water.  

There’s a whole new set of vocabulary words to try to make sense of it all, to grapple with the existential climate and biodiversity crises that communities across the world are facing. “Hydroclimate whiplash” is the term for more intense floods punctuated by periods of more intense droughts brought on by a warming planet. “Solastalgia” is the term for feeling homesick for the way home used to be, grief for the way things were. I can tell you this, grief comes from having truly loved. I comb the peddler’s mall, buying all the things I see that my mom used to have. I pay three dollars each for familiar “vintage juice glasses,” but my sisters laugh so hard they cry when I show off my find, because I didn’t know these are just jars that dried beef is still sold in.  

For me, Troublesome Creek is as real an entity as a person, the kith to my kin, the focal point in my early life quilt, the blue thread running through my very veins and leading to my career as a conservation biologist. I carry grief for lost loved ones and grief for lost wildlife. A colorful little fish called the Kentucky arrow darter has been wiped out of Troublesome Creek by water pollution. Many frog species face extinction, threatened by far more than mean little boys. Kids playing outside these days may not get to marvel at bats swooping after their badminton birdies like I did, and there are fewer lightning bugs around to chase. 

Just as I did as a high school student, I still draw comfort from trees. The 200-year-old short leaf pine in my yard was here before I was born, before my dad was born, and he would’ve turned 118 this year. “My” pine likely was a seedling when the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was passed, when this “land of the deer” belonged to the Shawnee, before it became a farm for corn and cattle, before it became this 25-year-old subdivision where I now make my home. Contemplating the pine’s sprawling branches grounds me and brings me joy. Migrating monarch butterflies roost in its boughs in late summer on their way to Mexico. White-breasted nuthatches store suet in its bark, emptying my birdfeeder by relocating the contents to the tree’s stretch marks. Pine warblers glean from its needles in spring on their way even further north. I love this tree. I fret daily that hotter, drier days than it’s ever seen are killing off some of its branches. This very evening, wondering how to wrap up this essay, the answer came to me as I reveled in the pink alpenglow cast on its scaly trunk by thunderclouds and the setting sun– finish with the beauty of the here and now. 

I’m feeling solastalgic for my tree, and it’s still here. I’m still here, giving my young pawpaw trees pep talks, facing the ghosts of my past, trying to save endangered species for the future, and endeavoring to be mindful of all the small details of the present. Because I know that the peaceful days, the sweet moments watching bumblebees and listening to the toads, exchanging seeds and stories with the neighbors, may not weave the most colorful threads of memory, but they form the background of the fabric that makes us who we are. Not everyone’s mom sold chili and crabapple pie from a makeshift concession stand at the carnival, and not everyone’s dad let them feed apples to elephants, but it would be nigh impossible to find someone from around Hindman who doesn’t have threads of memory from Troublesome Creek.