Travels in Philadelphia/Darby Creek
DARBY CREEK
The other day we had an adventure that gave us great joy, and, like all great adventures, it was wholly unexpected.
We went out to spend an evening with a certain Caliph who lives at Daylesford—how many Main Line commuters, by the way, know that it is named for Daylesford in Gloucestershire, the home of Warren Hastings?—and after supper the Caliph took us for a stroll round the twilight. In a green hollow below the house, only a few paragraphs away from the room where this Caliph sits and writes essays (he is the only author in Philadelphia who has never received a rejection slip), he showed us a delicious pool, fed by several springs and lying under great willows. From this pool tinkled a modest brook, splashing over a dam and winding away down an alluring valley. A white road ran beside it, through agreeable thickets and shrubbery, starting off with a twist that suggested all manner of pleasant surprises for the wayfarer. It was just the kind of road to see spread before one at the cool outset of a long summer day.
"This," said the Caliph, "is the headwater of Darby creek."
Little did the Caliph, douce man, know what that simple statement meant to us. The headwaters of Darby! Darby creek, and its younger brother, Cobb's creek, were the Abana and Pharpar of our youth. We were nourished first of all on Cobb's, where we had our first swim and caught our first tadpoles and conducted our first search for buried treasure (and also smelt our first skunk cabbage). Then, in our teens, we ranged farther afield and learned the way to Darby, by whose crystal waters we used to fry bacon and read R. L. S. There will never be any other stream quite as dear to our heart.
Until the other evening at the Caliph's we had not seen the water of Darby creek for ten years; not such a long time, perhaps, as some reckon these matters, but quite long enough. And our mind runs back with unrestrained enthusiasm to the days when we lived only two miles away from that delicious stream. Darby creek is associated in our mind with a saw and cider mill that used to stand—and very likely still stands—where the creek crosses the West Chester pike. To that admirable spot, in the warm blue haze of an October afternoon, certain young men used to tramp. While the whirling blades of the sawmill screamed through green logs, these care-free innocents used to sit round a large vat where the juice of fresh apples came trickling through some sort of burlap squeezing coils, and where fat and groggy wasps buzzed and tottered and expired in rapture. These youths (who should not be blamed, for indeed they had few responsibilities and cares) would ply the flagon with diligence, merrily toasting the trolleys that hummed by on the way to West Chester. We will not give away their names, for they are now demure and respected merchants and lawyers and members of Rotary clubs and stock exchanges. But we remember one of these who was notably susceptible to cider. On the homeward path, as he flourished his intellect broadcast and quoted Maeterlinck and Bliss Carman, he was induced by his comrades to crawl inside a large terra-cotta pipe that lay by the roadside. Just how this act of cozening was accomplished we forget; perhaps it was a wager to see whether he, being proud of his slender figure, was slim enough to eel through the tube. At any rate, he vanished inside. The pipe lay at the top of a gentle hill, and for his companions it was the work of an inspired moment to seize the cylinder and set it rolling down the grade. Merrily it revolved for a hundred feet or more, at high velocity, and culbutted into a ditch. The dizzied victim emerged at length, quoting Rabelais.
The mile and a half along the creek above this sawmill—up to where an odd little branch railroad crosses the stream on a tottery trestle and Ithan creek runs in—was the pleasure haunt best known to us. It was approached through Coopertown, that rustic settlement which the Bryn Mawr squire has recently turned into a Tom Tiddler's ground. Across stubble fields and down an enchanting valley carpeted with moss we scoured on many and many an afternoon, laden with the rudiments of a meal. There was said to be a choleric farmer with a shotgun and an angry collie on the western marge of the stream, and it was always a matter of courage to send over an envoy (chosen by lot) to bag a few ears of corn for roasting. But for our own part we never encountered this enemy, though Mifflin once came throbbing back empty-handed and pale-faced, reporting that a charge of lead had sung past his ears. Above a small dam the creek backed up to a decent depth, five feet or so of cool green water, and here bathing was conducted in the ancient Greek manner. There were sun-warmed fence rails nearby for basking, and then a fire would be built and vittles mobilized. Tobacco pouches were emptied out into one common store, and by the time this was smoked out a white moonlight would be spilling over the autumn fields.
We grew so fond of this section of our Abana that we never explored the full length of the stream. It would be a lovely day's jaunt, we imagine, to set out from Darby (where Cobb's creek joins Darby Creek) and walk up the little river to its source at Daylesford. (The original Daylesford, by the way, is also made lovely by the only other stripling stream that competes with Darby in our heart. This is the delicious Evenlode, an upper twig of the Thames.) It would be about twenty miles, which is a just distance for a walker who likes to study the scenery as he goes. Through the greater part of the trail the stream trots through open farming country, with old mills here and there—paper mills, flour mills and our famous shrine of sawdust and cider. The lower waters, from Darby down to Tinicum Island and the mouth at Essington, would probably be less walkable. We suspect them of being marshy, though we speak only by the map. Mr. Browning, we remember, wrote a poem about a bishop who ordered his tomb at Saint Praxed's. We, if we had a chance to lay out any blue-prints of our final rolltop, would like to be the Colyumist who ordered his tomb by Darby creek, and not too far away from that cider mill. And let no one think that it is a stream of merely sentimental interest. Hog Island, as all will grant, is a place of national importance. And what is Hog Island, after all? Only the delta of Darby creek.