The Wheelbarrow

I'm looking at an ancient metal wheelbarrow.  It has a newer wheel and it's laid up against the fence on the side of my mother's house.  It's been painted brown and it's rusted in several places.  Some of the original blue paint is visible in spots where the brown paint has peeled or worn away.

This wheelbarrow has been used for many things:

Transporting fertilizer

Transporting detritus

Transporting bags of chicken feed

Transporting bags of dog food

Transporting my sister

Transporting garbage to the town dump

It is to the two items at the end of the list that my mind wanders.

To distant memories.

*    *    *

It was the Spring of 1981.  It was a good season for fishing and we delighted in spending the afternoons with our mother, Felicia, on the banks of the Eel River.  Mother loved to fish.  She would often do so without the rod and reel you might assume one would use for fishing.  No, my mother fished the way she had been taught to fish in her native Philippines.  She used a fishing line that wound around a wooden wheel.  From the fishing line on the edge of this wheel she would affix a sinker, hook, and bait (often an earthworm from the garden).  Once she'd affixed the bait, she would toss the line into the river.  This was a very effective way to get catfish. 

Nanita, my baby sister, loved to ride around in the new shiny blue wheelbarrow that dad had recently purchased.  We delighted in racing around the backyard in it.

On a particularly beautiful Spring day, we decided to accompany mom to the Eel River for some fishing.  Nanita was the first person to get ready for our trip.  She'd loaded her favorite blanket into the wheelbarrow and climbed in.  As we accompanied mom on our walk to the River, we got strange looks from the people we passed.  Fortunately, they had enough couth to not say anything disparaging or embarrassing while in the company of our mother.

With the wheelbarrow, it would only be a matter of time before the people of Alderpoint took notice of how we used it.

Of course, we never actually fished with mom, but we would watch her from a distance.  The banks of the Eel River were a wonderful place for adventure and exploration.  Nanita and I would spend much of the golden afternoons of our youth, discovering the geological wonders that had been deposited by the waters of the Eel.  These wonders came in the form of rocks, so many beautiful rocks, many of them jadeite.  The powerful Eel also deposited mighty hills and islands of beautiful sand along it's shores.

Just playing in the sand and exploring the geological jewels were enough to keep us happy and content while our mother fished, but there was more to the Eel than just fish and rocks and sand.  Willow and alder trees grew in wild, abundant stands up the steeper banks of the river.  The further one got from the river's edge, the more beautiful and strong and majestic the trees were, for they had the luxury of time and of not being in the rivers path to grow and thrive in masses of boundless strength.  We would play in and amongst these trees and even in and around some of the larger rock formations along the river.

One particularly large set of boulders we referred to as the frog princess.  When I think back on the frog princess, I believe she was once a giant singular boulder that, with the passage of time, earthquakes, water erosion, and my imagination, had split in such a way that from a distance it looked like a giant frog, squatting alongside the river's edge.  Atop this rock was a thorny bush that was positioned in such a way that it looked like a crown, hence the name "frog princess."

After a few hours of fishing along the Eel River, mom showed us her haul of catfish.  There were more than a dozen in her bucket.  We looked at the catfish as mom described deep frying them, and we hurried ourselves for the long walk back to our house.

The trip home from the River was more difficult as it was all uphill.  Getting to the River was easy.  Getting home was another story.  Of course, my sister was tired and wanted to ride in the wheelbarrow.  I was also tired, but also determined to get us home.

As we walked through the streets of Alderpoint, we got more stares.  Mom didn't care.  She was an adult, and she knew she owed them nothing.  Nanita and I were a bit more self-conscious about the stares.  When we got home, we gleefully helped mom with unloading as we encouraged her to get right to cooking up those delicious catfish.