Spring Creek Mesa

(entry for 2/12/2025)

Of all the twenty-three places I lived in between my birth and my sixteenth birthday, my favorite by far (except for the summer of 1947, which we spent in Grandma’s cabin above Denver) was Spring Creek Mesa, about a hundred and fifty feet above Montrose, Colorado— a house we lived in from the summer of 1951 to the fall of 1952. (A typical stretch of the Mesa can be seen in the picture at the head of this post, though this is not where our house was. At my last visit I couldn’t find the house and it may be gone.)

All of the other houses we lived in while in Montrose (namely, three others, all still there) were in town, with close neighbors. We had a dog and a cat, but that was the extent of any livestock we could have in town, and even though Montrose was not then, and still is not, a large or crowded city, you rubbed shoulders with other people constantly. On the Mesa, we could stretch our wings and almost fly.

My mom bought a dozen week-old chicks, and it was a lot of fun to watch them grow up. (We left them behind when we moved out of the house back into town again.)

My dog, Ginger, was free to roam, though she never left our property, nor tried to. She left the chicks alone, and they ignored her.

All of our houses in town had, and/or would have, lots of trees, and therefore lots of shade. Our house on the Mesa had a couple of young, scrawny trees, but basically it was washed by sunlight every daylight hour. I loved the warmth and the light, though I later learned to love shade, too.

One particularly warm day was in the late fall of 1951. My hay fever was acting up, and I could barely see through the 'water' in my eyes. My mom was doing the laundry, which required being on the back porch, where both the washer and the dryer stood, along with the refrigerator. My favorite activity was reading books, but that was impossible at the moment due to the allergies. So I sat on top of the refrigerator and listened to the local High School football team game broadcast. (They won, 60 to nothing. I don't remember who they played.)

I'm not sure why that couple of hours sticks in my memory so, but it does. (I don't think I ever sat on a refrigerator any other time, before or since!)

I loved the sun-drenched cold, too, that winter. In fact, my fondest memory of all in that place is of waking up one morning with a very thick but lightweight quilted comforter over me, and discovering that there was about a forty degree difference between my exposed face and the rest of me. I let the frost nip at my nose and eyelids for a couple of minutes, then snuggled farther down in the bed, and covered my face as well. And went back to sleep. (We couldn’t afford to keep the heating stove fire going all night, as we had a limited supply of wood which needed to last the whole winter.)

I had gotten my first ever boy’s bicycle a couple of months before we moved there. (The one I had learned on three years earlier, and had ridden in the interim, was a small girls’ model, which we now gave to my sister, who was seven.) My folks had given me the new one for my eleventh birthday, and I was eager to ride it as often and as far as they would let me, and I spent hours riding around the Mesa, even on the busy roads, and when school started that first fall there, even into town to attend. (About a four mile trip.)

It was the old-fashioned type of bicycle that used the pedals for slowing down or stopping, rotating them backward to engage the brake, rather than the more modern type that has the brakes on the handlebars.

One day, while riding on a stretch of Spring Creek Road much farther west than our house, and therefore considerably higher, I decided to try a stunt. I was thrilled at the thought, though it probably in retrospect wasn’t quite as dangerous as it seemed at the time. Instead of the famous “Look ma, no hands” that some kids do when trying to impress, I decided to remove my feet from the pedals and wait till the last possible second to slow down as I raced down the hill back to the level of our house. I would wait till the speed was almost too fast to handle before I would put my feet back on the pedals and slow the bike to a sane speed.

Only one problem: Once I took my feet off the pedals, they began to turn of their own volition. Soon their hub was spinning forward so fast that when I tried to get my feet back on them, it was impossible. I couldn’t brake!

Fortunately, there was no traffic at all, , so I moved closer to the middle of the roadway, to avoid taking a spill because of some unexpected patch of gravel on the shoulder, and I just rode it out. I was probably doing close to sixty by the time I got to the bottom of the hill, which I think was fairly fast for an eleven-year-old on an out-of-control bike. Eventually the pedals slowed enough so that I could get my feet back on them. And could breathe again. I had survived! And have never told anyone about it, till now.

The low point in the road, which I had been speeding toward until I could finally stop, is something called the Spring Creek Ditch. (Here’s a photo.)

There’s a natural creek that carries rainfall from the Mesa down to the Uncompahgre River, between the foot of the Mesa and the town of Montrose, but most of its water is diverted into a man-made canal, which provides irrigation water to the many farms and ranches on the Mesa. This is called ‘the Ditch,’ though it is far too deep and wide for the name. I’ve never seen it quite as full as it is in this photo, but it’s always a lot bigger than the creek it’s fed from. There’s still a part of me that feels certain I almost ended up in it, but that’s probably not actually true or even close to true!

Another strong memory about the Mesa has to do with my girlfriend, Judy. Her family lived quite a ways farther south on the Mesa than we did. By the time she and I had both turned twelve, we thought it would be fun to hike from her house to mine. Since it was a little over five miles, it would qualify us for a Pathfinder Badge we both wanted, so, after getting permission from both sets of parents, we set out one late-spring Sunday in 1952.. We told everyone what route we would take, but also cautioned that we would fail to get the badges if there was any attempt at intervention, so everyone promised to leave us alone, with no surreptitious following along in a car behind us allowed.

Except for one particular event along the way, it was a delightful hike, with a warm breeze sighing along with us and lots of birds singing in the trees and bushes. The one exception was that about halfway along the hike I suddenly needed to go to the bathroom. And then, because of the change in my posture as we hiked, to try to ‘hold it’ better, and because I was wearing loose-fitting boxer undershorts that gave no support, I achieved an alarming erection. (The proximity to my first girlfriend probably didn’t help, either!) The jeans I was wearing provided a strong dose of friction, right through the underwear, and I soon became quite sore in the affected region. Pretty soon I was in agony.

I tried to hide it, but Judy wasn’t stupid. Having lived on a farm all her life, sometimes working along-side her dad or brother, with the nearest bathroom possibly sixty acres away, she was knowledgable about bodily needs and what people needed to do about them, and she had also observed a lot of amorous activity among the family’s livestock, including both horses and cattle, so she knew the facts of life without needing to be told.

She motioned for me to stop walking, and I did. She gave a small laugh. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’re way ahead of schedule. We can stop and you can do whatever you need to do. You can go behind that tree over there. I don’t mind. We’ll just wait here till you can go on.” I must have blushed a very deep red. I know my face felt like it was burning. She laughed again, a little louder this time. “I live on a farm, you know,” she said, as though that explained everything. Which it did.

I did go behind the tree. She stayed in the roadway. With the friction having stopped, it wasn’t long before the erection subsided and I was able to pee, though it hurt like hell. Finally I went back to join her. I think by the now the blush had subsided as well.

We finished the walk and earned the badges. No one except Judy ever knew what that thing meant to me! And I’ve never worn either blue-jeans or boxer-style undershorts again, to this day.

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