A long walk home

First of all, no, this is not about the Montgomery bus boycott or even the movie. It’s about an incident in my childhood that I thought I would share.

Gawd knows why, but anyway…

In the woods near our house was a storm drain into which the substantial rain and occasional snow runoff would flow, conveying said fluids out to the main storm sewer and thence to Kelsey Creek and eventually to Lake Washington. Well actually, it drained that way when the neighborhood boys (of which I was one) refrained from blocking the huge drain grate in what we poetically named The Big Ditch, located as it was in a ditch which was, you know, big.

The reason we blocked it was… Well okay, the first reason was just because we could. We had that in common with the dogs that always followed us around, now that I think about it. But the main reason was that when you blocked that big ol’ drain, which we quickly became expert at accomplishing, the whole bottom section of the woods would flood to between a foot and three feet deep. This in turn caused assorted fallen logs and the occasional kid-built raft to rise up off the forest floor and float free. We would use stripped branches as poles as we made like gondoliers. That is, if gondoliers were given to ramming each other in hopes of making the other guy or the occasional girl take a header into the drink.

This thing is, the neighborhood moms quickly discovered the correlation between gondolier wars and little boys coming home soaking wet and muddy from head to toe. So of course they forbade us ever again to go rafting in Lake Big Ditch. A prohibition that we naturally ignored. With the predictable result that one of us at some point was going to be the test subject who would determine just how serious our mothers were about the no-more-pole-rafting rule.

You’ve figured out by this point just where this is going. One of my strongest early memories is of trudging toward home in squishy sneakers and soaked, thigh chafing corduroys, trying to decide in my devious little boy mind which story would land me in the most trouble:

Door One – I waited too long and wet myself. Quite impressively, I might add, since I was soaked almost to my chin.

Door Two – I forgot what you said and went poling and fell in – oops, sorry.

That was one long walk home, lemme tell you!

Oh, by the bye, there was a third big reason why we enjoyed flooding an acre or so of woods. There was a family who lived across the street whose father was easily the most despised dad in the neighborhood. He was just not a pleasant fella. And as it turned out, his yard was drained by the same pipes that performed that service for the Big Ditch. So when the drain got (somehow, he types innocently) clogged, not only the woods but his yard and basement flooded. And ol’ Mr. Nasty would come unhinged and we found that highly entertaining. I don’t want you to think we were juvenile delinquents, so I won’t share the part about how we developed our technique for making the clogging of the drain look like an act of Gawd.

It was great being a kid in the fifties!