Down by the river

Growing up in a town of 3000 people, in a time when monstrously powerful computers didn't live in your front pocket, there wasn't a hell of a lot to do. No movie theatres, no malls or big stores to hang out at. There was a fairly decent spaceies parlour, and a couple of good video stores, but no real entertainment at all, and while I know this totally makes me sound like a truly old fart, we had to make our own fun. Luckily, we had The River. 

It wasn't any particular stretch of water, sometimes it was the Opihi, or the Temuka, or the Pareora, it was always just The River, On long summer days, it was the place to cool off. Nothing too fast flowing, like the Rangitata or the Waitaki, just a pleasant flow of water deep enough to give you some decent swimming spots along the way. 

Some of those swimming spots are still my favourite places in the world, even if a lot of them have been contaminated by dodgy farmers over the years, (making it so hard to take seriously their pissy protests in their shitty little tractors, complaining about having to comply with regulations when their literal piss and shit has seeped into the waterways for fucking decades.)

Even when it was far too cold to go into the water - which is about 3/4 of the year around here - there was plenty to do down there. If I needed a place to chill in the quiet and read comic books, there was always a spot in the grass, or I could head down with my mates to build weird roadways in the clay for our toy cars, and set up massively complicated forts in fallen trees for the Star Wars and GI Joe figures to rampage through.

It was a  place where you could explore overgrown tracks and find tiny spots of serene beauty, or learn to skip stones across the surface of the water.  There was always room to build small bonfires, or just look for critters and fish in the water.

Best of all, there was always plenty of sticks around, and kids who were mad for all things Star Wars could be sword fighting for hours and hours, learning to dodge and parry and thrust through sheer instinct and youthful recklessness. I still have some scars and am still very proud of them all.

I don't miss the rivers themselves, they're still there, even if those fucking farmers have drained so much of it for their irrigation. They've been running down the Canterbury plains for millennia, and will keep running as long as there are clouds in the sky. But I can miss those cheap and easy thrills, when all you needed to fill in an afternoon was a stick, a stone and some water.