Robot Claw

When I was a kid, I loved to dam creeks.

I was lucky since we always seemed to live somewhere near a creek or two. And when I say creek, I don’t mean in the American sense, where raging torrents are sometimes referred to as ‘creeks’. I mean shallow little waterways easily jumped over (at least during the dry season) although big enough to carry the occasional fish or yabby. I loved playing in and around creeks, and many adventures were had.

And there almost always came a time when, for arcane reasons ununderstandable to adults, I had to dam the creek! And this wasn’t once or twice, I did this many times.

Take this one for instance:

That’s our Kahibah house. There was a creek behind it that ran under the road. The main portion of the creek ran off the bottom right of the picture, but behind our house it took a 90 degree turn up and ran more or less parallel to the road. This tributary was small and muddy and fun to play in. Many frogs were caught; many tiny fish were collected. And the high dirt walls were structurally perfect to sustain a dam.

At first these were piddling affairs; just dig out a bit of mud and pile it up, maybe mixing in a few found rocks and a fallen branch or two. The water would build up and eventually wash everything away. This was of course fun, but I could do better. And I did. In time I would learn which types of mud worked better and how to divert the water through a (hand dug) side channel to allow unimpeded construction.

Within a year or two I had veritably obtained my PhD in ‘child creek construction’, and these were the days in which I would ‘bake’ mud bricks in the hot sun using old icecream containers as molds. The bricks would be hardened with grass cuttings and cemented with rich black mud dug from the walls of the creek. Using this technique I once turned this flimsy little creek from something ankle deep to something I could sit in and be up to my neck 🙂

And this wasn’t the only creek:

I wonder if the people living in those houses know there is a creek running underneath their properties? Back in those days (198X), my brother and I and a few of the neighbourhood delinquents took what mother nature had provided and terraformed it into a waterslide. We smoothed the dirt walls with water, built a small dam downstream to create a pool and actually slid down the gently sloping creekbed like we were at Wet & Wild.

Such were the amusements of the proletariat urchins in 1980s suburban Australia.

These dams would last days, sometimes weeks. I recall building rudimentary crenelations atop one, and putting little twigs up their to represent flags atop the castle wall. I’d play in and around them, getting awesomely dirty and muddy, and then we’d run along home and hose each other off before going inside. Sometimes we’d had to pick leeches off as well, since they were common foes. If they’d had enough time to get a good suck going there would be blood when you removed them. I’d occasionally collect these guys as well and keep them in a tank, but I think my parents used to discourage this 🙂

Dam building hit it’s apex probably when I was about 10 or 11 years old. At that time I never saw a creek I didn’t want to dam in some way, even if it was just throwing a dead tree into it. It couldn’t have been an interest of mine only, since sometimes we’d fine dams on creeks obviously build by others. I should have formed a guild.

As with all interests, time caused it to fade, and during my highschool and college years I’m sure the last thing I ever thought about was trundling into the bush and building a muddy creek. And yet…

That’s lovely Valentine, where my then-girlfriend SMC lived. One day we were walking along the lake and came upon a lovely little creek behind a sport field. Amazingly we ended up spending some hours building a decent dam. I guess the spark hadn’t disappeared after all!