The story of Tardy’s Creek
Every other place is on the way. You are passing through, following the water down, and the next one is always ahead. Tardy’s Creek is the one you turn off into, and it goes nowhere. That is a feeling nothing else can give. The lake is wide, the laguna opens out, the sea is enormous. A creek is narrow and overhung and hidden, and you can see both banks at once, which is the whole difference. The trees lean in and meet overhead — the only roofed place anywhere — and hardly any light gets down, just a few pale shafts and their reflections. It is the darkest stop there is. A creek is tidal, so at slack water it does not flow at all. It simply stops. The surface goes absolutely flat and dark and doubles everything, and one leaf comes down through the light, and lands, and the ring spreads out and goes, and that is the only thing that happens. It is the one piece of the world that belongs to Tardy rather than to its residents, and it has none: nothing lives in the creek and nothing is hidden in it. It is still and empty and roofed. It is the we-are-not-going-anywhere-now place, which for something meant to get a child to sleep may be the most useful stop of the lot.
Stories from Tardy’s Creek
Nothing from here has been published yet. Tardy’s Creek is still being filmed — the honest kind of gap, like the route’s “resident owed”.
In the archive
4 pieces of Tardy’s Creek exist in the archive — 2 locations, 2 sheets. They arrive here as they are approved and published.