Walk with me a bit to a couple spots along a memorable trail.

The trail I’m on in my mind is muddy and foot-worn. It serves animals, mostly, and the few people who care to trudge its normally sodden and insect-infested, tree-shaded twists and turns – guesses, really, always keeping water to one side or another.

A handful of boys, resembling those you might have seen in the movie, “Stand By Me,” are on an adventure, not unlike the ‘pirates’ in like-minded accounts of “The Adventures of Huck Finn.” One or more pairs of vertical striped jeans may have completed the ensemble with horizontal striped shirts on one of these days.

We are at the edge of the known world. Overland Park was only incorporated a few short years earlier. Locally loved – and often flooded – Indian Creek drew us past the new houses and building sites. We opted for a shortcut by following the gaping, wide cement storm drain, trying to slide on the slick algae in our Converse shoes.

Terrain changed, and we lost the cement uniformity as the storm drain transformed back into a stream before passing under the Santa Fe Road (slated for being some kind of super highway around KC, I-435). Going got a little rough, as we followed the more regular and muddy flow through the wilderness of woodland waiting beyond. This was a lowland, in the flood areas of the creek, which some farmer had long since given up trying to plow.

Dense understory plants make our way an adventure, as we try to find the deer trail we recognize (across there, on the opposite shore of Indian Creek). We find an old barbed wire fence line that ends in two searched directions.

We get to the waters of the larger creek, and we look for the route across that gets us the least muddy – the least in trouble with our parents over the dirty laundry to do.

Farmland, there is better walking on this side of Indian Creek. We stop along the banks at a weir (we just call it a dam). A resemblance to “Stand By Me” comes into play as we rest, enjoy the sun and shade with the water, catch tadpoles, and even remove a few leaches.

In modern setting, the I-435 highway, just in the planning when I was a kid, passes (its 8 or 10 lanes) right along Indian Creek, so you now hear the background thrums of passing cars. Also amazing, the old farmlands were built up into an irregular set of commercial office buildings, Corporate Woods, with bike trails and a goal of preserving the natural environment as much as possible. I have a pic around here of bringing Sharon and our daughters to the weir some twenty years ago, and it hasn’t changed much from what they saw, either. I’ll find that sometime.

The biologist in me has come back many times to the weir and various stops along the trail. In the creek, I am grateful and put at ease, when I peer into the shallow stream water and see a variety of fish and insect species, indicated success of the attempt to conserve this gem of riparian ecosystem.

This area was the southern tip of expansion for the Overland Park suburbs back in the day. Paved roads ended at College Boulevard, and it was farmland beyond that. Much change has continued since my youthful explorations.

This is one of several memory trips for which I recently brought digital and film cameras in hand. I’ll have some more for you, sharing times we hope you can imagine. One or two might prove I was a little rambunctious for parental and more modern sensibilities.