Age 9
In the mountain towns of Colorado, there are small creeks running everywhere — fed by snowmelt from higher up, quick and cold and perfectly clear. You can see the bottom, every pebble. The water moves fast in the narrow parts, slower where it spreads out. Near a park in one of those towns, there was a creek exactly like this, and Dylan found it.
He wasn’t doing anything complicated. He found some sticks and some leaves and he put them in the water at the top of a little current and watched them travel. The current carried them away. He found more sticks. He tried a larger leaf. He tried a shorter stick. He stood there for a long time doing this, watching each one go, while Papa sat nearby on a bench and watched him.
A little farther on was a bigger river, wide and moving fast, cold enough that your feet would go numb in about a minute. There were dogs there — people had brought their dogs to the river, and the dogs were swimming out into the current to retrieve balls and then swimming back, dripping and delighted, over and over. Dylan watched the dogs the way he’d watched the sticks: patient and interested, in no hurry at all.
The week had bigger things in it — hot springs pools and long mountain drives and the alpine slide that Dylan loved. But this was the part where he was most himself: standing at the edge of a small creek in Colorado, experimenting with leaves, watching to see how far they’d go.