Big Raccoon Creek - Mansfield to Bridgeton 8/21/2005

A Great Blue Heron flaps and powers itself above the trees. A Kingfisher makes a splash and flies away with a Raccoon Creek morsel. Sometimes the kingfishers are silent and sometimes they warn like a bad school yard whistle. We are just passing through on our super linear polyethylene personal watercraft taking only pictures and leaving not even footprints.


The water sparkles when it is runs fast, we read the creek: creek bends right, look for current and deep water on the left (and vice versa); hazards above the water are identified and avoided, we call out advice to one another; avoid the underwater hazard indicated by a v shaped ripple coming toward you; head for the middle of the inverted v ripples that indicate current flow converging.  

When it becomes green and quiet, there is time to watch the sun filter through the trees. Bright green rays shine through the dark shade of the thick old growth of trees that line the banks. There is another rank of trees standing behind them and more behind them making the farm fields we know to fill Parke County seem distant. A white Sycamore towers and causes us to look. Why stand naked of bark o' great Sycamore? Another Sycamore's leaves catch and hold the sunlight like pancake sized golden ornaments on a dark green shade tree and is mirrored in the green stream.

To a background of cicadas, a silent Monarch butterfly meanders upstream and turns my head up and back. Coyly, she stops on an overhanging branch for me to have one more look. Come here often? 

I wonder if the creek bed in this section is limestone - it is stone of some kind and easy to walk if you must. Black Eyed Susans line the bank for observation on one side then the other. In the sun, I think some of them have brown eyes this late in their season.  

A peek of a barn red bridge grows until it fills the sky then shows natural wood underneath and is gone. Not really gone - just behind us. The next covered bridge, where we took our kayaks out last year, is really gone. Arson. I followed the news when it happened but this is my first time to see the Bridgeton Covered Bridge gone. It sure leaves a big empty place.

We took our kayaks out a few minutes before they would have floated by it.