A moment of flowing Zen

A short video of The Falls(tm) at The Farm(tm) from last Sunday:



Try it in HD if you can.

This is the Greenville Creek, as seen from our camping area on The Farm(tm). It's also where my first dog, Habu, is buried. She loved springing from rock to rock and catching (in her mind, anyway) little wavelets created as the water breaks around the rocks.

Those rocks are a part of my indentured servitude childhood. The fields on The Farm(tm) have a lot of rocks that float up from year to year, with sizes ranging from baseball to watermelon. The larger ones present a risk to the health of the plow blades, so there was a concerted effort made to remove the rocks before the plowing for the next year's crop. We'd walk up and down the fields, picking up any rock larger than a softball and tossing it into whatever we were using to haul rocks in our group. Choices ranged from the front bucket of a Ford Jubilee:



to a trailer pulled by an old Farmall H:



Naturally my favorite job was driving the tractor (either one, although I preferred the Ford) although that lost some of its appeal after the day I drive the Jubilee off a 4 foot bank and into the creek. Well, 4 feet at least. Maybe more. I'm trying to guess conservatively. I was about 14 at the time so things probably looked bigger to me then, particularly as my life was flashing before my eyes on the way down to the creek. It took a Mack truck with a Holmes 750 to pull it back out:



That looked pretty big to me at the time too. Oh well, it's probably a good thing to learn early in life that tractor brakes on 1050's tractors are essentially useless. At the time of the dunking, I was dropping a bucket load of rocks culled from the fields over the edge of the bank as part of a years-long effort to stop the erosion of the fields from the creek flowing by. Not all of the big rocks out in The Falls(tm) were carried there by us, but a lot of them were.

The creek runs all the way back up to Greenville (of course!) and there is a canoe/kayak launch point there. I hope to some day kayak from Greenville back down to The Falls(tm), a distance that I'm guessing to be between 8 and 10 miles. The only thing stopping me is that I have no way of knowing the conditions of the creek. I'm primarily worried about getting stuck by a tree fallen across from bank to bank. The kayak is pretty heavy - I'm not sure I'd be able to get it over a good sized tree. I need another kayak so I can bring a team mate along to help with things like that.