Summer Days...

I glanced out the window a few days ago while working, and the memory of what I would do as a kid during summer days hit me like a brick.  

The earliest that I remember my time as my own must have been when I was five or six.  We lived in a ranch-style house in what was then known as "Kutzman's Edition" - seriously, that was what the first sign said.  Out in the countryside north of Sartell, Minnesota, on what I knew as "The Great River Road".  Up where we lived, you could no longer see the Mississippi most days thanks to the larger yards and heavy trees.  We were probably a quarter-to-half mile from the river at that point, which was probably something of a relief to my mother, who was attempting to keep safe one boy and two or three girls.

But there were days when I was released to the tender mercies of the neighborhood, where I found a bunch of other boys to hang out and play with.  The rather rural area was slowly succumbing to sprawling housing developments.  Our house was the first on what we sort of referred to as "the back road".  Off the Great Northern road, you made your way west for perhaps 200 yards or so, then north about three-quarters of a mile, before turning back to the "main road" where we were prohibited from going.  

Next to my house was an open lot, then another with a family of four or five kids, I do not recall the exact number, but Wayne, a few years older than me, was the main organizer of many of our shenanigans, if we hadn't already come up with something else to do.  Next to his house was another open lot, then the house where my friend Chris lived.  Another open lot, then the house where we sort of drew the line, but another friend of mine, John, lived.  Next to his house was the home of two rather irritating girls we all tried to avoid.  Then there was Jeff's house, followed at the corner by Shawn's.  

The main road, out front, also had a cast of characters.  There was Jason, whose family built two homes in the neighborhood.  Most of the "front houses" had empty lots behind them, and as I grew older, those lots filled.  I do not know exactly when we moved there, but I was 11, it was St. Patrick's Day in 1975, when we moved from that house to the home that had been my Grandmother's, maybe a mile away, on the Mississippi River.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The front houses started with a pair of empty lots, front and back, which were filled by homes that were built by the family who had a boy and girl around my age, Virgil being the boy.  Next to that house was a house with two kids we didn't do much with, mostly because they were pretty busy doing other things, I'm not exactly sure what.  Next to their house was a house of a couple who did not have kids, and next to their house was the home of my friend Dan, whose home was usually where we started many of our adventures and games.  We played kickball/baseball in his back yard, Monopoly on his screen porch, and lots of other things.  

Dan's house was really where the line got drawn.  Next to his house was the house of an older gentleman and his wife, no kids anywhere to be seen, so we avoided his yard.  Then there was another open lot, followed by three houses, one filled by a family of kids who were almost always getting us in trouble.  Their large St. Bernard ran free regularly, and was terrifying.  After a few more houses without any kids, there were two final houses before the road to the local farmer's home and barn, followed by a large farm field.

Those days, in that neighborhood, were usually filled by bike riding, running around, playing baseball, kickball, or wandering the woods.  To the south of our house was a large section of woods that was a real delight in wandering.  A trail led into the woods, and in some spots we could see through to the back yards of the homes along the main road.  We could also travel about halfway down the trail to the "junk pile".  I do not know where or how it started, but it was sure a treasure trove.  Many bits of construction and demolition material were found there, and we avoided riding our bikes too close to the pile thanks to stray nails, etc., that put holes in our tires,  That was the "easy woods".

To the west of our house and all of the other "back road" houses was a huge pasture.  Very heavily wooded, it was occasionally occupied by the dairy cattle the farmer raised.  Set off from our yards by five strands of barbed wire strung on metal and wood poles, and a few trees.  To the inevitable horror of most of our parents, we'd go out exploring that woods most spring, summer, and fall days.  

Our yard was in an odd spot.  As the "demo" house for the neighborhood, we were on the back corner, and to the east, a few open lots that were eventually filled by homes.  To the south, right up to the end of our back yard, was that easy wooded area.  To the southwest, starting at the corner of our yard, which was marked by an out-of-place telephone/power pole, was a large cultivated farm field, usually growing corn.  I wasn't smart enough at that age to know the difference between seed, feed, and sweet corn, so we inevitably tried to cook a few for mid-day snacks.  Our little fires never got big enough to heat the water to boiling, so the half-raw corn we tried to eat was usually pretty disgusting.  But then behind us was this massive wooded pasture, which had, almost straight back from our house, a fenced lane.  This lane ran along the southern edge of another cultivated field, but then, we got to what we called "The Slough" - we pronounced it "Slew".

That was a little waterway that didn't have a stream feeding in or out.  But it was another place to play that wasn't too often thick with cows.  Or their leftovers.

We had built a couple of tree houses in the pasture, and further north from my house was a heavily-wooded area that hid four old rusted vehicles.  We would poke around those, and eventually we'd find interesting items we would use when we'd go "squirrel hunting".  I did not have a BB gun like some of the other guys did, but I carried what I surmise was a car horn - a straight steel tube with a sort of bowl end which had plenty of heft.  

Aside from that rather shameful pursuit, most of our summer days were filled with killing time.  Mornings, mostly, because the afternoons would get hot.  And what I now realize, but didn't then, was that not a single house in that development had central air conditioning.  We didn't until we moved to the river, where the condenser unit ended up right outside my window, which meant I was on ice watch - if the humidity and temperature difference between in-and-out was too great, the coupling between that external condenser and the tubes that carried the cold into the house could freeze - and the cold air stopped coming from our air vents.

Perhaps one of the fun things we used to do in that "old" neighborhood was ride bikes up and down the road.  The asphalt was pretty heavy with rocks in it, I'm not sure if that was because the contractor was cost-conscious or it was designed to provide a bit more traction during the winter when that road was only rarely plowed.  I do recall that the road rose slightly from the main road and then past our house to just past Wayne's, where there was a slight hill that dropped maybe five feet.  Then the road rose again, to the far turn, where it dropped maybe eight feet down to the road which then rose to meet the main road again.

After we moved from that neighborhood into what had been Grandma's neighborhood, my summer days changed.  I didn't have anywhere near the number of playmates, as the neighborhood was smaller.  Rather than a drive-through neighborhood, my Grandmother's road came to a dead end.  Way out by the main road was a house with a family of five kids, most of whom were older than I was.  The first house on the river side of the road was occupied by the grandmother of my friend Karl, who lived next door.  Next to his house was a large lot with a small, empty cottage on it, followed by the next house, which had only two girls living with their parents.  Then came our house, followed by the last house in the neighborhood, with two kids older than I. 

Having to mostly amuse myself, as Karl's primary pursuits consisted of studying German (he was fluent at about nine years old) and refinishing furniture.  Seriously.  So I'd spend some of the hotter days in the garage, making things.  If the weather was cooperative, I might go down one of the paths to near the river.  I'd found an old tree that was barely stuck in the riverbank with a root that had sort of protruded out from the ground towards the river, then stuck itself back in.  With a few pilfered nails and a board or two, I'd built myself a seat that was about eight feet above the average water height, where I could sit and cast out into the river.  

I did not want to catch anything.  The small bay area in front of our house had become the primary home of bullheads, nasty black-colored fish that had sort of whiskers sticking out of their heads which you did not want to touch - if you were not careful, the whiskers could stick in your hands, causing some damage, including stitches and a trip to the doctor - and you really did not want to have Mom call Dad, some 25 miles away, and ask him to come home to take you to the doctor's office.  Dad was the only one in the family with a driver's license until I was in Junior high, about eighth grade. 

But if I wasn't feeling like sitting in the garage or the hot sun, I might haul out a hose, shovel, hoe, and a few smaller gardening implements to the river bank.  The river was some fifteen or so feet below the river bank, which fortunately meant the bottom of our basement was still a good six to eight feet above the average river level.  

There were a couple of wonderful spaces right along the bank, and I loved them.  Closest to the house, and furthest north, was a small little grotto that had served many purposes.  In the earlier portion of the 20th century, before the permanent Sartell Dam was built, the bay in front of our house, the east side, was deep and open to the river.  It was also the swimming hole that the neighborhood tended to use.  A sort of diving board had been built, and head-sized rocks had been laid into the riverbank to stop erosion.  

When I was a kid, spending time out there with Grandma, it was a small flower garden with a "burn spot" where she would burn her easier-to-dispose-of garbage.  We didn't have regular garbage truck routes back then, about once or twice a month my father would head over to Grandma's house, hook up the big old wooden trailer to his station wagon, load it with garbage, and take it about a mile down the road to the city dump.  For a few dollars, they would unload the trailer and we'd drive back to grandma's to unload the trailer. 

The burn spot in the little grotto was next to several pine trees which had formed a wonderful little hiding spot.  At the old house, I'd taken a saw out to a group of things my mother called "Chinese elms" growing next to the pasture fence, and I'd cleared out a few so I could have my own hiding space.  That hidden spot under the pine trees, and my fishing bench until the tree fell onto the ice one winter, were my main hiding spots in the new yard.  

Next to the bay, my grandfather had laid a series of about twenty slabs of granite stones to be a stairway to the river.  These were also edged by big rocks where my grandmother had added flowers.  I probably forgot to mention that if we were talking trees and shade, the new house on the river was miles above and beyond that old house in the Edition.  

We had three trees in our yard.  The monster, out front, was an old oak tree perhaps 150 years old, and like many oaks, no branches sprouted from that trunk through the first forty feet or so.  It shaded the house most mornings, but by 9:30 or so it was just shading the yard.  The back yard had three trees, until one died and had to be pulled down by my uncle, who got it to drop right next to the garage, and not on the house.  There were two more trees, on the south side of the back yard, which sat right at the edge of a little lip that saw the yard go up about a foot or so.  

The river house had probably fifty trees in the yard.  There were the five pines grouped together on the northern edge of that rock garden area, which had another huge pine a few feet away.  It was paired with an oak tree with a very unusual trunk that bent almost ninety degrees about five feet above the ground, and two feet later went back to vertical.  There were six other oak trees on the river bank, below the main flat area of the yard.  In the yard, the river had a few more pine trees along the edge, and one big pine right in front of the house.  After that, we had two hackberry trees and a maple tree up near the house - the hackberry trees had to come down when my father added on to the house, but we still had another dozen or so oak trees, one of which was surrounded by a ring of rocks, and more flowers.  

We did have a little crab-apple tree out in the "new garden" area, right over the rhubarb and horseradish plants, right next to the wild strawberry patch.  There was an aspen tree right next to the shed, which was next to the old oak tree with the two-by-four board that had grown into it, it had been hung there to hang various fish or game to smoke over wood fires, which was where the "big burn pit" was for many years.  

Behind that tree, to the west, was a small Garden my mom started when we moved there.  And one of the pictures I deeply treasure is of my own two children standing in front of a pine tree - a pine tree I had dug up, when I noticed I was about to mow over it, in the yard, some thirty years before.  That tree, which had been maybe the height of my thumb, in the yard, had grown to over forty feet tall.  I'm sure it was taken down when the next owners bought the property, but that entire neighborhood has become McMansions, much to their shame, but it is what it is.

Back to my youth and summer days, when I'd haul out the hose and all of those implements of destruction, I'd go to work on the stairs.  Working back from when we moved into that house, it had been maybe ten or fifteen years that those steps had not been cleaned.  Due to the number of deciduous trees, the leaves had formed layers almost a foot thick on the lower steps.  The upper steps were cleared by shovel, rake, and hoe, pulling the rotted, half-rotted, and recently fallen leaves of the steps and lobbing them into the slowly growing hard ground below.

The bay in front of the river house was spring fed.  Our neighbor, who was well over six feet tall, had told us about once falling into the bay, which he thought might be three or four feet deep.  As leaves fell on the stairs, they also fell into that bay, and forming a layer of leaf sludge three feet below the surface of the water.  The bay itself was some thirty feet deep.  I figured this out by taking a rather heavy rock and tying a length of clothesline to it, and throwing that into the bay.  When I pulled the rope out, which hadn't remained attached to the rock, I measured the wet portion of the rope above the knot.  It came to, near as I could figure, 31 feet.  Plenty deep.

But I'd clear stairs, and as I got close to the bottom of the stairs, inspiration struck.  I'd haul the shovel and hoe down to the river, and then tromp along the bank.  We didn't have a beach area, most of the sand had been washed over to the sand bar which extended out some sixty feet or so from the point of land that stuck out next to the small creek that fed the river next to the neighbor's house.  I went to work on a narrow area on the spit that had grown between the bay and the river, trying to cut a channel which I had hopes would naturally continue to grow and drain the muck out of the "swamp".  

Inevitably, I'd be hacking away, summer morning or afternoon, on that project, only to have a motorboat pull up near the shore.  The river bottom was very rocky, due to the loss of sand, but it also sloped out, very slowly, away from the bank, until I could get in water up to my chest.  I didn't go much further, because I knew not much beyond that was the dropoff, where the bottom went from 6 feet to over twenty feet deep.  The current kept that area clear, though on years when the river was low, we could see the submerged island across the river start to stick out.  I always felt sorry for the folks that lost a chunk of their yards to the river, 

But that boat would, about every other week, be occupied by DNR officials making sure I'm not damaging the river.  A few of them who spoke with me did know about the spring and the bay, and they merely pointed out that the current changes would not permit my goal to happen - the spit of land would continue to grow and be in the way.  Some of them did not much care, even after I pointed out the granite wall on the riverbank next to us, which had a pair of changing rooms cut into the underground behind the wall.  They would tell me that, since the wall had been there before the law protecting the river bank had been passed, it was permitted.  I'd complain "so their unnatural wall remains, but my attempt to restore nature to what it was is forbidden?"  

At least one of those comments got the response "have you heard about the doctor, upriver, just beyond the bend there, who bulldozed his entire riverbank?  And lost the property to fines?"  Yeah, mention the possibility that my folks might have to spend money on my stupidity, even though my mother encouraged it, and that would put end to that project - at least that afternoon, if not a week or more.

Those days when I couldn't spend time in the shade by the river or garage, I'd probably end up helping in the garden, somewhere, somehow.  In the yard, behind the big pine tree, out near the concrete-and-river-rock-and-polished-agate grill, was a concrete pad some eight feet square, with two steel poles sticking upright.  One was an open pipe, going into the ground.  The other was topped by a steel contraption.  One spring my father went into the yard without me (it must have been when Mom kept me in the house), and he removed this contraption.  He took it into a hardware store in town, and it came back, well, functional.  

The contraption was an old hand-pump.  The two foot long steel lever was attached to this piston which would rise and fall within the pump.  Dad's trip into town had been to get the old, rotted leather gasket replaced with a new leather gasket.  You could stand there and pump for hours and accomplish nothing.  If, on the other hand, you'd bring out a pitcher of water and soak the top of the pump, and the leather gasket, it would swell, sealing the inside of the pump, thus causing the action of the pump to suck up, from some sixty or more feet below the ground, delicious, cold, clear water.  Eventually we got a plastic trash can, and we used a succession of ice cream buckets (the five gallon pail obviously not having been invented yet) to haul water from the pump out to the large "corner garden" my mother had in the yard.  

Up near the southwestern end of the garden was an even older, rustier pump.  It didn't work, nor did the wooden cover that protected the some ten-foot-deep pit below.  No, I was not stupid enough to go down and take a look, I primarily functioned as the water pumper.  Though at one point the suggestion that we get a large feed tank from the local farm store, and put it up at the high southwest corner of the garden, if we put the water into that, and put a faucet in the bottom edge, couldn't we run water down the entire garden?  My sisters did not like the idea, because it meant they would have to walk even further up the garden.  

Dad, however, was likely inspired by it.  Who am I kidding?  This is the fellow who, when adding on to the house, included an odd electrical box on the southeast corner of the new addition.  From that corner to the river bank, he called the local plumber to run an electrical wire, that came out on the river bank and served to power a river pump.  An electrical pump that sat out on the river bank some fifteen feet above the water, where each spring I would get to take the "trap sink" out into the water and drop it on the bottom.

The first year, the four foot long steel cage was in a mesh bag to prevent fish or other organic or inorganic matter from being sucked into the pump.  This mesh bag, which was relatively expensive, based on my mother's comments, had to be replaced.  And again, the following year, when she asked me how to protect it.  

I suggested an "overbag" of heavier wire mesh, not so much to filter as to protect, and to attach the thing to the bottom in such a way that it would not move - the major issue being the passing boat traffic and natural wave action was causing the intake to move along the river bottom, causing the bag to rip and grind away.

Our final version to protect the intake was a steel cage made out of heavy wire mesh, almost a foot bigger around than the cage.  Inside that mesh cage was a series of wooden sticks that served to hold the interior cage with it's four long steel pipes from moving.  The whole thing was held on the bottom of the river by a couple of good old concrete blocks, set up so the intake hose was sandwiched between two lengths of 2x4 that were held in the concrete blocks - I'd bolted a cross-piece across one end of this capital I sort of looking thing (with two vertical parts to the I).  I waited until I had the thing in the water, and the pieces through the concrete blocks, before attaching the top "serif" of the I - crossing my I, if you'll forgive that bad dad joke, dear reader, and that kept things pretty solid.  I don't think we replaced that mesh bag the last three years I lived at home.

Which also marks the end of the lazy summer days on the river. There were a few adventures I had along the river - fishing with friends, exploring the river bank alone, tree climbing, shed climbing, and other silly things.  There was the lean-to shelter I built for my mother using my scouting pioneering skills to use some of the chinese elm and sumac trunks from the more over-grown portion of the yard to create a half-way stop for her to cool down, or the start of the "water feature" that saw me digging a hole some eight feet wide, twelve feet long, and four feet deep on the deep end - then we found out what additional labor would be required for footings, concrete forms, rebar, and concrete - I expect that hole was there when the buyers toured the property.

I do hope they love it as much as I did, and do.  It was a wonderful place to be a boy and explore.