What does the source of a river look like?

Most people live in the plains and seem to really have no idea what the source of the river is. When I was a child, I lived in a village that was located halfway from the top of the mountain to the end of a creek. This creek turned into a small river in front of my grandma’s house, and then turned into a big river in the town where I grew up and studied and lived. This big river is very wide and many places may call it a river, and finally flows into the sea in the town next to ours.

At the end of the creek is a spring.

The spring in our village feeds a stream with a continuous drop of about 200 meters. The ancients cultivated terraces on both sides of the stream and used the water from this stream for irrigation.

In the winter of several years, I found that there was no water coming out of the spring, but the downstream stream did not stop flowing, so I guessed that in addition to the water supply from this spring, water also came out from other parts of the stream.

Many people may not know what a creek looks like.

A stream is completely different from a river. The entire stream is not a very narrow waterway. There will be a deep and wide puddle at intervals. Then after the water flows out of this puddle, another puddle will appear every few meters. I guess these puddles are also springs.

There are several large puddles in the creek about 200 meters away in our village, but they are not big enough to be used as a swimming pool when we were children.

But if you continue downstream, there will be deep and large puddles in other villages. Children in our village have to run there to swim.

There are some waterholes that are very, very deep, so deep that they have their own legends, often called dragon pools (I didn’t know until I grew up that there are dragon pools in many places). The village closest to our village built a large complex on top of their dragon pool, and village activities are held there.

In addition to the spring at the end of the creek, our village also has four open-air well springs that are used as drinking water sources. Three are inside the village and one is on the periphery of the village. Their geographical location is much lower than the spring at the end of the creek.

I have never seen the three wells in the village stop flowing. Water is flowing all year round. The water is cold in summer and warm and misty in winter.

The water from these three wells will flow into the creek from the side, but there is no fixed waterway between the three springs and the creek. The middle is all fields. This should have been artificially modified. There should have been fixed waterways flowing into the creek before.

The water from the well outside the village flows into another wider stream. That stream does not belong to our village, so we call it B stream.

The creek in our village flows out of our village after experiencing a long slope of nearly 80 degrees and 30 meters at the head of the village, merges with B Creek and continues to flow downward.

My grandma is located at the foot of a mountain, which is a township. The creek coming down from our place merges into the creek in this township. After the creek merges, the creek becomes wider. When it reaches the door of my grandma's house, the creek is almost 5 meters wide.

When I was a child, I lived at my grandmother's house for more than a year. During the summer, I went down to the river to catch fish and shrimp every day. But then I heard that a child drowned, and then all the deeper parts of the river were filled in.

Now every time I go to my grandma's house, I feel that the river in front of me is lifeless at all. I don’t have any photos, I really should take some!