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Ding-dong.

"Dad, look what I found," beams a 10-year-old boy standing outside the door holding a 10-inch bass.

"Where in the world did you find that?" asks the somewhat befuddled father.

"The creek."

Ah, the creek. For many, a little water flowing over some rocks and pebbles is the first foray into the outdoors.

Teeming with life, a creek turns into a mini-biology class once kids enter its environs. Barefoot or in water-friendly Crocs, little explorers can (and will) spend hours uncovering its mysteries, which consist mainly of corralling creatures.

Once that first crawdad is found, the hunt is on.

"Oh my gosh, crawdads live in there," was a first reaction. "Then we went there almost every single day."

Boys being boys, and girls not cowering away except from the creepiest of crawlers, an aquarium soon becomes filled with found fauna. A lizard. A frog. A turtle. Even a 7-inch baby snake. (Better hope it's not venomous). Kids being inventive, a gallon ice cream container turns into a trap for minnows, tadpoles and crawdads. Add some snails and some bugs for the captured critters to eat, and you have a homemade biosphere.

Sloshing around in a creek brings out the explorer in youth — but it also brings back fond memories of youth to the more experienced.

A first memory of the many treks to a creek skirting our neighborhood is a dirty one, literally. At age 7 or so, Mike Lewis flirted with danger as tried grabbing the exposed roots of a large oak overhanging the bank. His failure sent him, back first, into the muckiest of mud before heading straight home totally covered in the goop, crying.

Years later, on a winter hike through the leaves, Mark Brower and I found an alligator snapping turtle dead, half above ice, half below. Not long after that, Doug Shaiper and I caught two catfish my father fried up for us.

(He didn't want anything to do with the bullfrogs we came back with, though.)

An avid arrowhead hunter, I was flippantly asked by Doug Schank, "How do you find them?" Seconds later, after explaining to look in the riffles for anything flintlike, a perfect 1-inch point was fortuitously pulled from several inches of water. "Like that," was the snappy answer.

Today's kids are making similar memories: A crowd of bikes strewn along the entry point of the neighborhood says the summer scouting is in full effect.

A trip to the creek a day after a thunderstorm saw the big crawdads flushed out of their holes.

"This one was red and about this long," says an excited youth, his hands almost 10 inches apart. "We had it, but it pinched Haley and made her bleed and got away in a hole."

But a nasty looking 7-incher wasn't able to win its freedom.

"Can we cook it?"

The bass, however, was the kick in the pants: Found in less than 4 inches of water, the fish was approximately 10 inches long. How it got that big and that far up a creek that goes some distance before reaching any pools is mystifying.

It might have grown quickly on a diet of crawdads, perhaps.

In the aquarium, the bass was offered a hand-held worm, and ate it. Unfortunately that turned out to be its last meal.

"Can you dissect it?"

Wow. I suppose so. After showing them how to lip it and everyone wanting to give that a go, Filleting 101 ensued.

"That's the heart."

"Cooooool."

And that is exactly what getting a kid interested in the outdoors is. All you need is some time, perhaps a bucket — and a creek.

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