Carpenter Creek lou wilkinson Jed was the first to dump. I could hear him shouting over the rush and gurgle of the water. From the pitch and volume of his scream, I could only assume that the water was pretty darn cold. Jed was the first to dump, but he wasn't the last. Or the only. We were "creeking" and it doesn't get any better than this. Flying down a flood-stage creek in sit-on-top kayaks, on a warm day in northwestern Indiana. The water brown and roiling. And loud: the swollen creek roars and gurgles, not with fury, but with a simple over-the-top exuberance of being alive and strong on sunny summer day. In order to creek, you need a couple days of big rain and a small creek in a large watershed. The creek will fill with the runoff from the fields, get higher and higher until the lower branches of the trees are actually at water level. You also need pretty fast reflexes and a blatant disregard for the cuts and scrapes inflicted by bouncing back and forth between the narrow banks and whipping through the tree limbs. Sunglasses are mandatory if you like your eyeballs intact and unviolated. The optimal amount of water is when there's just barely enough room to get under the bridges. When the creek is right at the flood stage but hasn't yet run over its banks. That's when the water is the fastest. That's when the ride is the wildest. Forget those river guides in the mountains...the leisurely stop and group review of the rapids...casually deciding whether to take a particular rock on the right or the left side... ...this has nothing to do with that. This is flying down the stream, high into the overhanging trees, with the curves and twists of a small creek: there's no looking ahead. You do not canoe, you do not kayak a flooded creek. The very words "canoeing" and "kayaking" indicate that you have some measure of control. When creeking, you have no control. The creek is a live thing, dark brown with mud, swirling and churning with a pattern and rhythm all its own. A flooded creek is a living being, capricious and wild. "Strainers" are the danger here. Those places where a tree or other obstruction lays across the creek and acts like a net...the creek passes through, but anything like a canoe, kayak or body will be caught in the limbs. With the entire force of the stream pushing down, it's a real and considerable threat. Anyone or anything caught in a strainer simply isn't coming out against the current. So the skill, the art, the prime directive of creeking is to never, ever get caught in a strainer. Whatever it takes. Moving so quickly and with so little visibility, what it usally takes is jumping off. Quick. Dive off, get to the side of the stream, drag yourself and your boat over and around the obstruction and launch on the other side. Jed dumped first. But over the next six miles on this roaring, sliding mud brown creek in the warm Indiana sun, the two of us would dump repeatedly...deposited at the shuttle car soaking wet, muddy, scratched from head to toe, and laughing so hard our sides hurt.