“And that’s why they think you are weird”.
It was the voice in my head that said it, but where that originated I’ll never know. Was it my own self loathing, the collective subconscience, God, a stray thought from my wife detected via ESP?
But yes, we were travelling 160 miles to see and photograph a culvert. In my defence, it wasn’t just any culvert, it was where I used to play when I was about six years old.
Possibly still in the weird territory, but this was basically a place where a number of convergent streams dipped underground, and had formed a wide basin with shallow water that was perfect for little feet to splash about.
I hadn’t been there for about thirty years, and even then, the splashing about was ten years before that. But I’d had an idea for something creative that got me thinking of this culvert. In my mind’s eye, this was an idyllic place of sunny days and happy memories. Something Bernstein Bearsy. How nice would it be to go back?
Long springs and longer summers, we played all sorts of games on the grassy field beside it, jumped in the water, built dams. We brought our Transformers and Go-bot toys and waged war in the canyons and long grass. That’s what I remembered.
The reality was actually a bit grim.
It was smaller than I recall, and overgrown. There was no way that this was a place frequented by little feet any more.
Perhaps if I had visited in Summer, it might have been a different story, but this was not what I wanted to see. The wide river basin was barely a foot at its widest. The vast flood plain where we made our base was just grassy mud. The sound of children laughing, gone, as if it never even were.
They do say that you can never go home.
Duggan's Dig 
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