CHEATED

CHEATED. I had been cheated I didn't get a sunny summer. It rained a lot and was cloudy which wasn't typical of a Utah summer. My mom was working in the yard and I was complaining that I wanted a nice day so we could go swimming. It was only days before school would start and summer was over!

I didn't get as many days to climb our neighbor's monstrous tree where I sat in a rustic homemade tree house and read Nancy Drew and Happy Holister mysteries. The upside was that I hadn't been stuck up on a too-high limb desperately hoping someone would hear me yelling for my dad to come and help me down. Thank heavens for fathers who eventually come and rescue adventuresome daughters when they are out on a limb.

Lake Creek, the stream that ran by my house was always flowing full tilt that year, instead of being slowed to a trickle, off and on, by irrigation upstream. That made it so we couldn't be daring and wade through shallow puddles under the culverts that ran under the streets (always warning each other to listen for "big water"). Big water sounded like a trickle at first and then grew to sound like limbs and branches being banged about and rocks rolling along in front of a mini-freight train.

To tell the truth, we were rarely in the creek when the water started flowing. We were always under the assumption that we could be drowned at any minute (never mind that the creek never got deeper than 2-3 feet). In defense of all the warnings by parents, the water did flow swiftly at peak season. I used to dream that my brother, Phillip, didn't heed the warning and I had to do a swift water rescue when he jumped off a rock into Lake Creek and nearly drowned.

We often pretended that an evil troll, the bloody Red Baron, lived under culverts and hid in dark spaces where two pipes of different sizes joined together. We caught minnows, crawdads and a fish called a "Sucker" in the puddles left by receding water. We collected rusty junk and treasures galore. I pictured myself as a coon hunter that set traps for raccoons in the river bottoms in Where the Red Fern Grows. We made friends with horses that were on our route down the creek. It was so fun to meet up with kids downstream who were also making their own make-believe tales.

Old ladies hated that we were traipsing up and down the creek bottoms from main street to 400 west, under fences and through stables and yards and pastures. Even though we were (of course) harmless, sweet, and darling children, sometimes an old lady or two would think it her civic duty to tell us to get off their property or to tell us they were going to call our mothers. We knew the creek was city property and thought we were within our rights to just stay in the creek. We just got sneakier when near their property and didn't care if they called our moms. Our moms knew where we were. I vowed to never be one of those old biddies that growled at kids for sport.

When the water was slow, a frothy foam of brownish white would form and we called it "Indian soap". That was to go with the Indian Tobacco that was a dried rusty plant that grew near Lake Creek and crumbled into a palmful of stuff that looked like the insides of a cigarette. There were some wild hops that grew next to the the creek next to our dentist's office near main street. We pretended to make beer. I'm not sure they were really hops. But, they were fun to pop to make a little noise. We had to leave the ditch once or twice to follow the creek to our house because there was a grid over the culverts in some spots to keep junk from plugging the creek and flooding. So we scampered as fast as we could across the street to get back in the ditch.

It might have been that year that we had a terrible spring flood when all the streams and rivers overflowed. We were afraid our basement would flood but we were on the high side of the creek bed. Ellis Clyde, the town clown, got in a row boat and rowed down main street, bringing everyone to laughter when main street was flooded. The water was up to the tops of the car wheels. Every store on main street had flood damage that year.

There is always a bright side to everything. I developed a skill that rainy summer that made me quite a long jumper. We called it the "broad" jump back then. My friend Nancy Moulton and I jumped Lake Creek when it was at it's fullest. Back and forth we jumped, trying wider and wider spots until we could jump great distances. We did it running and we did it standing in place. We fell in the water sometimes. But, we kept drier the more we practised. We jumped into grass at the waters edge that sometimes came up to our thighs and we sunk into the muddy bank with a thud. It was a Huck Finn existence. But, the next year brought much sweet sunshine and appreciated adventures.