So here is a story.  

This is me with Pap-Pap and Grandmother (yes, we call her ‘Grandmother’, and her children call her ‘Mother’) at Clear Creek State Park when I was a much smaller human.  Grandmother is Kaye’s daughter, and the person whose house emptying has resulted in me getting all these photos.   This was the photo I wanted when I went to Grandmother’s house.  Pap-Pap died after a very short but very potent stint with early onset Alzheimers in 2012, and he and Grandmother were a big part of my childhood, so this photo was something I wanted in particular. 

Clear Creek is a place my family has been coming since before I was born.  My Grandparents discovered it sometime in the 70s when attempting to take their kids camping and they went back at every opportunity since.  I don’t remember a time when Clear Creek was a first time, because I was brought there every summer since I started existing as far as I know.  It’s a precious place.  I try to take people I really love there, and they all later confess they were not expecting it to be as wonderful as it is.  It’s a good place.  It’s full of inside jokes and stories and experiences for almost 40 years for us.   I went on egg hunts here, first heard Monty Python songs here.  My brother learned to ride a bike.  A friend and I came up with some of our most beloved original stories. 

Clear Creek is also the site of a former Civilian Conservation Core Camp, and it’s why the place exists as a park with cabins - the cabins are the ones the company stayed in.  There’s a little museum inside the park dedicated to the men who worked there and what they did in the 1930s that also doubles as a little nature museum.  Some of the dusty things in that museum are memories as precious as the place itself.  

The state’s website for Clear Creek seems to know just how magical it and its old bridges are:

The nearby Farmer’s Inn Restaurant and… Gift Shop/Petting Zoo/Ice Cream Stand/Furniture Store/Mini Golf is just as well loved by anyone who goes to Clear Creek.  It’s standard American Country Buffet stuff, really, but it had a charm to it that made it well loved.   My friend Amy also accidentally fed a muntjac from her hand thinking it was a baby deer.  “Oh, cool, Amy’s feeding the fanged thing!” is still a fondly remembered cry from that visit.

Here’s some of the inside.   They decorated with a lot of items from the CCC Museum in Clear Creek to help with the rustic historic feel. 

So hopefully I’ve made some kind of impression of how tightly woven into the fabric of us this place is.  

Sometime in the early 2000′s, my grandparents were sitting in this restaurant and got seated in a place they’d never been before, very likely at the table nearest us in this photo, and they were looking at the photos on the wall.   In a group of young CCC guys posing with some cars and other equipment, my grandfather recognized his biological father who had been killed in a car accident when he was only 4 or 5.  

Pap-Pap and Grandmother notified the manager, who was happy to loan them the photo to make copies when she heard that Pap-Pap’s biological father had helped build the place Pap-Pap’s entire family loved and felt so tied to for so any years.  

This was a photo I was equally obsessed with finding when Grandmother’s house was emptied.  I wondered if it really was what they thought, if they were just seeing what they wanted to.  I had no idea she had other photos of him, I had no idea she had his discharge paperwork from his work at Clear Creek, and that that guy looking a little mischievous second from the left-most was really who Pap-Pap thought he was.  But here’s the back of the paperwork listing it just as much as the front (with all his personal info) does.  He wasn’t in the CCC for long, but he was in Clear Creek after he enrolled Maryland. 

I found (and repaired) this tiny photo of him in my grandmother’s things: 

And these of my Pap-Pap (which haven’t been cleaned or adjusted):

Those are some of my favorites of Pap-Pap, I don’t know why he looks like he’s starring in a Noir, but I just really love them.  I’d been eager to find a good set of photos to compare resemblance and these seem appropriate.  Many years ago, in a trip to Canada, a man walked by my grandfather and greeted him by his birth last name.  They didn’t know each other, and the guy just kept walking, but I’ve always wondered about the resemblance since I heard that story.

Until a few years ago, this was kind of where the story neatly tied up.  Yay, family discovers they have a biological tie to a place they love dearly and found accidentally and now they have documented proof. 

But, in 2017, the Farmer’s Inn burned down.  Really burned down.   Nothing at all left burned down.  (Petting zoo animals all safe!)

They’ve rebuilt, and they’re open for business, but I haven’t been there.  Not yet. 

But I feel like I have to go, even if just to return a copy of a copy of a photo they happened to seat my grandparents next to 15 years ago.