Shaped by Water

By Andrew Pruett

The streams, lakes, rivers, and oceans—in these waters, I was shaped.

    

My name is Andrew. I grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, exploring the waterways of my youth.  It wasn't until survival and combat swim training in the United States Air Force that I found God in the water. As I got older, my adventures and experiences with water continued to teach me the power water has to support life and shape the world. Now, I am a father. Just as water has shaped me into the man I am today, water is shaping my son.

    

Water is everywhere—calling us, showing us the way, and teaching us to flow around life's obstacles—and we must protect it. We must be good stewards of the Earth and protect what God has given us, so our children may joyfully explore and thrive in the world we leave them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fox Pointe Publishing, LLP
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215741955

Andrew Pruett

I am married to my beautiful wife JoAnna, and together we have one son, my pride and joy, Theodore. We live with 2 parakeets, 3 fish aquariums, and 2 dogs - Jackson, and Eve. AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS Winner of the Rochester Public Library Water Stories Memoir Contest (2021) Environmental Achievement Award Olmsted County and Rochester Public Utilities (2019) Named ‘Minnow Brook’ Olmsted County, (2015) Pi Lambda Theta International Honor Society (2006) Recognition of Excellence Award Educational Testing Service top 15% nationwide (2006) AFLAC Fireball Star Series Qualifier Award for outstanding sales performance (2004) AFLAC Fireball Award for outstanding sales performance (2004) Arle & Bill Haeberl Award for pursuit of excellence in broadcasting, U. of M. (2001) Certificate of Academic Excellence, University of Minnesota (2000) Certificate of Academic Achievement Honors student R. C. T. C. (2000) Military Achievement Award for Co-founding the Airmen Against Drunk Driving organization for all Department of Defense personnel & their dependents (1997) VOLUNTEERING Treasurer for Liz Boldon for MN House (2019 - 2021) Cub Scout Den 1 Leader (2019 - 2020) Associate Chair Olmsted County 25 W5 P7 Organizing Committee (2018) Parent Volunteer Holy Spirit Catholic Church (2017 – 2020) AWANA Sparks Leader, Christ Community Church (2017 – 2019) Quarry Hill Nature Center Animal Care (2011 – 2020) AWANA Cubby Leader, Christ Community Church (2014 – 2016) Head Election Judge Olmsted County (2008 - 2020)

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Copyright © 2022 by Andrew Pruett

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Fox Pointe Publishing, LLP. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is a memoir. It contains the author’s present memories of experiences over time. Some names have been changed, some events have been condensed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

https://www.foxpointepublishing.com/author-andrew-pruett

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pruett, Andrew, author.

Roiger, Katie, editor.

Farr, Chelsea, designer.

Shaped By Water / Andrew Pruett. – First edition.

Summary: The author recounts tales from his life which demonstrate

his connection to water and the important of water conservation.

ISBN 978-1-952567-82-7 (hardcover) / 978-1-952567-83-4 (softcover)

[1. Personal Memoirs – Biography & Autobiography. 2. Environmental

Conservation & Protection –Nature. 3. Fatherhood – Family & Relationships.]

Library of Congress Control Number: 2 0 2 2 9 3 4 7 0 8

Printed and bound in the United States of America by Lakeside Press Inc.

First printing June 2022

To my wife, thank you for your support.

To my son, thank you for the inspiration.

To my loving family for everything.

Introduction

The night was dark and foggy when my mother’s water broke. She and my dad climbed into a brand-new, full-sized, 1976 brown Ford pickup truck and slowly, painstakingly drove from Plainview to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota where I was born. I was raised in Rochester because my parents both eventually got jobs at the Mayo Clinic. With the improvement in pay and benefits, we were able to travel to 49 states on family vacations. I went to Hawaii, my 50th state, on my honeymoon 34 years later, returning to Rochester to raise my family. I know from experience what Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, has to offer. Water has made me who I am.

On July 8th, 2012, my wife’s water broke at Methodist Hospital, a medical center that is part of the same Mayo Clinic hospital system as St. Mary’s, and my son Theodore was born. When the doctors lifted him up and turned to show me, he peed on everyone in the room. This seemed to be Theodore’s way of announcing to the world that he was here and was not going to be ignored! Water is also shaping my son into the man he will someday become.

I’ve lived life adventuring in and around water. Exploring streams, rivers, and coastlines has connected me to water in profound ways. Water is everywhere—calling to us, showing us the way, and teaching us to flow around life’s obstacles. Not even dams can hold water back indefinitely. It always finds its way around the obstructions in its path.

Water shapes our world, and it shaped me through survival and combat swim training in the Air Force and through my adventures with my son. I share my values with my son through shared experiences in and around water. Our stories are written in water, the very elixir of life.

Chapter 1: Bear Creek

When I was seven or eight years old, I began exploring a stream known as Bear Creek that flowed between 50th Avenue SE and Bear Creek Park in Rochester. I especially liked the area between 20th Street SE and Camp Kahler, the old Boy Scout camp. The creek, as we called it, was located a mile from my house. I would walk there alone or with my brother Alex on our way to meet friends. We visited so often that we wore a dirt path from our house across the farmer’s alfalfa field to the creek.

The water of the creek was clean, clear, and cool. Its bottom was clean sand as deep as a little boy could dig. Sometimes we ran up and down the creek as fast as we could, just to see how far ahead of our footsteps we could get. Then, we’d turn around and watch them splash closed. At other times, we cannonballed into the deeper pools along the banks. We swam in the pools beside great tree trunks that had fallen into the water 100 years ago, or so we imagined.

Minnows glimmered in the water, not by ones and twos, not by tens or twenties, but by the hundreds. I can remember watching great schools of minnows separate before me as living waves. I ran through these schools of minnows imagining that I was Moses, parting the Red Sea to free his people. I hardly ever went to the creek without a bucket and a net. I caught fish, crayfish, turtles, and some of the most interesting insect larva I have ever seen. Once, we even caught buckets of lampreys, long eel-like fish with circular, boneless mouths.

I can still recall how moist and refreshing the air smelled. The breeze often carried the scent of flowers in the spring and leaves in the autumn. The feel of the sand flowing with the water around my feet was joyful, playful, and interesting to me as a little boy. I remember standing in one spot while the water eroded the sand from in front of my feet. The gentle current piled it up behind me until I couldn’t stand straight and joyfully toppled into the water. I did it over and over again, just for fun. I wish those days could have lasted forever.

My brother and I had three great delights: adventure, exploration, and discovery. When joy is everywhere, it brings a feeling of peace. The peace I found at the creek stemmed from a sense of belonging and the serenity found in clear water flowing over clean sand under great trees. The place itself filled me with a deep sense of belonging that seemed to emanate from the quiet sounds of nature and its beauty. Nature has a healing power, and for me, this sense of peace is where it came from. Maybe I had found one of the thin places where heaven and earth were closer together. Maybe my guardian angel alighted here to watch me play, in a safe but wild playground.

The fun I had at the creek was not the fun of an amusement park. It was not the excitement of meeting your grandparents after a long time apart. It was the fun that is found when the place you know seems to know you in return—when the place that you revisit over and over is just the way it was when you left it last, yet somewhat different. It was the fun that happens every time you are surprised with some new critter or a fresh marvel brought about by the changing seasons.

I explored this creek in spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each season brought with it the pleasure and joy that God grants to those who look for it by getting to know a special place. It is the pleasure that is experienced by letting that place connect you to the grandest scale of the universe. I often lay in the warm sand on a tiny beach along the creek, looking up into a clear blue sky through the dappled sunlight filtering between maple leaves. Sometimes, I watched the soft white clouds drifting high somewhere between earth and heaven. How many times did I imagine angels looking down at me or playing in the clouds? I dreamed of what it would be like to drift between the forest and heaven on the wings of butterflies. These were some of the happiest times of my childhood.

As the creek froze in the winter, I broke off chunks of ice and pretended that they were icebergs. Sometimes, when the ice hadn’t completely imprisoned the creek’s waters, I would free an especially large slab, grab a branch, and ride my iceberg like a raft down the creek. I imagined I was an old-time river rafter heading for the camp of Lewis and Clark or an Arctic explorer on the lookout for polar bears. While visiting the creek, I could feel a connection to the times before Olmsted County was settled.

Sadly, as the years went by, the creek didn’t stay the same. At some point during the 1990s, I noticed that the diversity of minnows in its waters had decreased. The size of the chubs and suckers had gotten smaller. I no longer found softshell turtles and only occasionally found snappers. Even the creek chubs were absent. Gone were the interesting insect larvae at which I used to marvel. Silt dirtied the once-clean sands, and I didn’t feel safe walking barefoot in the creek anymore. I began to find garbage: first plastic bags, then cans and glass. Broken bottles and metal littered the banks. Beavers used to live in the creek, but someone had trapped them out. I know because I found the traps. The beaver dam had been ripped out to release the water, and another beautiful thing was gone.

When the Boy Scouts started talking about selling Camp Kahler, I asked them to make it a park. I petitioned them to sell it with a conservation easement to protect the great trees and the creek. Sadly, the Scouts did not see the same value in the camp or the creek that I saw. I was a child, thinking the thoughts of a child. I had the unbounded, unconstrained hopes of a child. I tried without success to save the place I had come to love, but I was alone in my efforts. Who else had I seen at the camp after it closed? Who else did I find wandering the trails at sunrise or sunset or even in the dark on nights when the moon was full? During the many times I had visited the park alone, I had never seen a fellow wanderer.

God calls us to be stewards of creation, and Boy Scouts are supposed to be stewards of the land. I failed to protect the creek. As a Boy Scout, I couldn’t protect this piece of paradise that needed protection. This didn’t mean that I failed to live up to my own ideals. To fail is human, and God knew my heart. He knew that even though I was a child of 17, I did my best, I kept true to my faith and that is what mattered.

Because I had never encountered another person exploring the creek whom I hadn’t invited myself, I felt that the birds, the creek, and the very place itself knew me, and no other. Throughout my childhood, the creek became a friend to me that can only be described in transcendental or mystical language. This was the place I visited alone when things at home or school bothered me. I felt safe, welcome, and at peace in the embrace of this treasured spot. Why did this beautiful creek bring me such comfort? When I sat alone in the outdoor amphitheater or in the clearing among the pine trees that served as a chapel at Camp Kahler, I felt centered. In this place, listening to God preach sermons through the wind in the trees, I felt better than I did anywhere else.

The creek that ran through Camp Kahler was the place that connected me to my center. It connected me to God and the greatness of the natural world. I could go there sad, mad, frustrated, or confused, and leave at peace, no therapist needed. I knew every rapid, every turn, and every tree along the banks of that part of Bear Creek. My mind still walks those paths in my memories today. Step by step, I retrace my childhood along the golden sands of Bear Creek through the sandy trails of Camp Kahler.

***

Like all children, I grew up and left home. I joined the United States Air Force in 1994 and said a temporary goodbye to Minnesota. The creek receded into my memories, though I would revisit it many times in the years to come. When I returned home in 2008, in need of healing from the slings and arrows of life’s misfortunes, I went back to the creek to sit on its banks and think. I found a place that I knew well and listened to a mourning dove, a chickadee, and some blue jays sing their songs. They didn’t recognize the stranger in their midst. The place that had once known me so well didn’t seem to know me anymore. The traffic sounds were louder now that more people lived in the area. I missed the natural quiet broken only by the murmur of the creek.

Bear Creek is still there and it still needs protection and time to heal. The cost of modern development is high. During my last visit, I found a bike in the water under the bridge and garbage drifting where minnows once swam. Magazines, cans, bottles, and plastic were growing algae and marring nature’s beauty on the beach. Gone was the purity of the stream and gone was the purity of my youth. I mourn the loss of both.

In 2018, I contacted the DNR about the water quality of the creek and this is what they said: The last time we looked at the data on this creek (2013) [...] we found too much bacteria to support [...] splashing around, so it is impaired for recreation. This doesn’t mean you can’t go into the creek, but you want to [...] be careful, especially a day or two after a rainstorm. It’s not always suitable for swimming and wading due to high bacteria levels caused by the presence of human and animal waste in the water.

This news upset me. Our children need clean creeks and water for play and adventuring. My child needs a creek, a forest, a wild place to experience the three great delights—adventure, exploration, and discovery. He needs to be able to connect to the natural world and explore without fear of unseen contaminants washing over him. Can we give this tainted legacy to our children, to the next generation?

This choice isn’t one we can make as individuals. We must make it as a society, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents together. The choice will be made, whether we choose consciously or not. Choosing not to choose is a decision in itself. I hope that we will all choose a brighter, cleaner, and more beautiful world—a world where clean water flows and minnows swim freely. A world where a boy like me, or a child or grandchild like yours, can play, walk, and grow under the embrace of great trees in the dappled sunlight of their magnificent canopies. 

This is why I am passionate about water quality. To care for the rippling creek, the gentle flowing stream, and the calming river is to care for my friend. My hope is that these waters will always be protected as we prepare our world for the generations to come. The magic is there to heal our wild spaces. We can choose to set it free.

Chapter 2: Lake Thunderhead, Missouri, 1991

During