I put the boy down on the cool patio of river stones and dragged the cooler over the log, hair still erect on the back of my reddening neck from our encounter with the snake. We tiptoed silently up the bank to the fork in the river, the place where our pebbled beach was widest, and I tucked the cooler under the shade of some scrubby brush to keep it out of the sun. While I gathered smooth, round stones for skipping, the boy pried the biggest rocks he could muster out of the sand and gave them a sudden, satisfying bath along the river's edge, delightedly giggling each time the displaced water from a shot-putted rock soothed the heat off his skin. It was a hot afternoon. Meanwhile, I picked out a target. It's not enough to just skip the stones; I hoped to hit a distant rock rising from the river's surface. Silas wasn't impressed, even when a perfect stone, launched with my best Kent Tekulve submarine motion, skipped too many times to count. He had seen a thousand stones skipped and a thousand concentric circles radiating from where the stones left their mark on the water.
Kent Tekulve demonstrating the proper form to skip a rock.
"Dadda, can we catch crawdads now?" he asked, substituting the "y" with an "a" to compliment the persuasiveness of his tone.
"Not yet, I've got to hit that rock."
He knew I meant it. He grunted, and, though he was already thoroughly soaked despite not setting foot in the water, he went back to unceremoniously returning large rocks to the river to pass the time until a skipping stone found its target. It's easy to skip a stone, but no two are precisely alike in weight or shape, so aim is another matter entirely. But after gathering another round of ammunition, I finally grazed the target.
"Got it!"
"Oh daddy," he grumbled, shaking his head. It was the toddler equivalent of a teenager saying, "It's about time, old man."
He went for the gear, a bucket and a Cars minnow net with Lightning McQueen smiling from the plastic handle. If I had one tenth of the merchandising sales from that movie we would have butlers bringing us our crawdads while we lounged in a Biltmore House-sized estate. A Cars minnow net? They left no stone unturned. And neither would we. Wordlessly, the boy handed me the net and then plunged the bucket down to catch the river, finally getting his frog wellies in the water. Here, in shallow water and out of the reach of the strongest current, the riverbed stones collected a fine moss that attracted tiny snails. We tried to take care with our footing, both to remain balanced on the slippery stones and to mind the mollusks. The boy brought the bucket back to the bank before rejoining me in the shallows. All there was left to do was slip a slimy rock out of place and see what darted out. More often than not on this stretch of the river, each displaced rock meant a displaced crawdad. Sometimes, eluding the net, a homeless crawdad would find shelter under an adjacent rock only to realize that there was no vacancy. They are territorial little boogers, so the smaller of the two would hit the open river, or the net if I was quick enough. Soon, we had a bucket half full of unhappy boogers climbing on top of each other in hopes of breeching the rim of a bucket shadowed by the watchful posture of a boy.
When Silas started pegging the would-be escape artists with pebbles I told him it was probably time to let them go. Forever in his passively defiant state, the boy had a suitable compromise. He informed me that we would construct what he called a "quarium" to house them, making the crawdads free from the confines of the bucket, but not entirely free. The rock walls went up at the edge of river, and before long we had what looked like a miniature campsite fire pit ready to call the crawdads home. He took the net and fished them out of the bucket, shaking the net ever so not gently until they found their way into the pit. Each one, like a newborn sea turtle, instinctively made for the water, only to find their path obstructed by our hastily constructed pit. The smallest amongst them would wedge their way out eventually, but the boy was waiting between the quarium and the water, and after recapturing the jail breaker he would examine the pit and patch its weak points with a few more stones. Fortunately for the captive crawdads, the one thing the boy likes better than building things is destroying them, and after I promised lunch after their release, Silas went Godzilla on the quarium and our pinchy playmates scurried back to the safety of their rocky river home.
Our shadows had shifted to the east, so lunch was long overdue. We rinsed our hands in the river water, though the boy quickly used his grimy shirt as a towel, recasting his tiny fingers in grit. Watching a boy eat a PB & J with filthy hands, smearing a mixture of the sandwich's filling across his face and sleeve in the process, is the sort of thing that might make you recoil in germaphobic horror before you're a parent, but somehow it doesn't bother you when it's your kid, especially if he trained you for this moment with volcanic outbursts of spit up all through his first year. He made his way through the meal as I looked on, toothlessly grinning. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing your kid eat. He offered back a smile full of teeth; a bit of purple oozed through the gaps. But at least he didn't show me an open mouth full of food. Progress.
After the boy shotgunned a sippy full of Juicy Juice we burned off the sugar buzz with a wade through the water, his hand, pink from the chill of the river, seeking the warmth of my own hand whenever the water got deep enough to flood his wellies. Deep, rushing water is one of the few things that triggers his fear mechanism. That and snakes, but by now the snake that greeted us was a distant memory. Shivering in his drenched swimsuit and t-shirt, the boy made his way to shore, ready for the hike back to the truck once I pried off his wet things. The jelly stains in his fresh set of clothes were faded from the wash.
When we got home I pulled out the laptop and googled snakes of North Carolina. According to the Davidson College snake identification website, "The northern watersnake is often mistaken for the cottonmouth because of its dark coloration and habitat preferences." It wasn't even a poisonous snake after all.
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