Shades Creek runs from just west of the Birmingham race track to the Cahaba River. Though not one of the creeks I imprinted on, I’ve been in it for over half my life so that makes it… “home creek”.
It is most accessible to most in front of the Brookwood shopping mall where it appears to the many casual observers as a largish drainage ditch. It takes about two minutes of concentrated watching before the creek’s true nature begins to manifest. By the five minute mark you realize you’re looking at something like those National Geographic drawings –“Life in the You-Name-It” – where every possible animal is drawn sitting about 12 inches from each other.
Snakes, fish (bass to two pounds, carp to eight pounds, and bream so beautiful that I’ve seen the species featured in a German aquarium fish book), mink, muskrat, beaver (I never actually saw the beaver but there was once a dam which, making the most of available materials, had a shopping cart in it), groundhogs, kingfishers, great blue herons, hawks, at least four species of turtles (some individuals way bigger than you’d think possible give the depth). I keep waiting for an alligator to show up.
Mostly I’ve fished there. It’s the perfect place to go if you’ve got to go but don’t want to make a full blown expedition out of it. The only down side is the occasional critic, driving over one of the four bridges, who sees you fishing in a drainage ditch and offers a crude evaluation of your prospects. I make an effort not to be taking a fish off the line with such geniuses watching so as leave them in useful ignorance.
All the wildlife notwithstanding, early Shades creek does flow through an urban setting so there are modern human artifacts, mostly golf balls. However, one early, drizzly, Sunday morning I look down and there’s a gun, looking like a moderately realistic, but surely toy, version of a .22 revolver. The toy hypothesis was ongoing as I picked it up – the true weight masked by being underwater – but once in the air it was clearly a real gun.
So without a moment’s hesitation I cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger. These were two mistakes on multiple levels. The first level was the noise, which was loud, my being basically in a sound chamber given the surrounding 30 ft high backs and a concrete bridge almost over my head. The second level had to do with the likelihood of the barrel being full of silt (think exploding gun); fortunately not. The only thing I did right was the ol’ “never point a gun at something you don’t want to shoot”; i.e. not my foot or a rock.
When my pulse settled down I unloaded the gun and started warming to the find. Demonstrably functional, I had a free pistol with only one missing grip. So I stuck it in the snake bag and fished on.
Before leaving the creek, I got to wondering what that gun had been up to previously that led to its getting tossed in the creek. Recalling a drug trial (jury duty) emanating from the general vicinity it occurred to me that the gun may have been up to “no good”; and did I want said gun turning up in my position? I further reasoned “no I did not”. So I drove to a nearby police station, and with the gun still in the snake bag, proffered it to a policeman getting out of his car. We went inside where I explained to them how I came by the gun and did not want it. At first they did not know exactly what to do (the base story being a little unusual) then one said “We can impound it”. I says “Sounds good to me”. For months I kept waiting for a call from a district attorney, who having done some ballistics, knew exactly what the gun had been up to and where was I at some particular time & place. Never happened.
Yea, there’s more in Shades creek than critters. I once found one – yes one – skin diver’s flipper. Bet there’s a story goes with that.
ML
12/17/2010
