The Wrong Lesson Well Learned

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I report to you once again from the first day of the rest of my summer vacation. A first day, I might add that has given us 36 straight hours of rain. And if the weather man is to be believed (not that he ever lies), we are in for another 24 hours of rain tomorrow; the first day of our summer vacation.

Not to worry, it is supposed to clear up on Saturday. This is important because the main reason we are in Long Lake is for the wedding of a family friend on Saturday. I know that you are surprised. Based on earlier reports, I can understand that you might believe I came to spend time with the beautiful Miss Beverly, viewing Buttermilk Falls, climbing a bald topped hill, and biking on very hilly terrain. However, utilizing well honed blogging skills, I managed to keep our motives hidden, building the interest until the last moment. Then bang, I whip out the real reason for coming to Long Lake and “wow” you the blog reader.

One good thing about the 36 hours of rain (other than honing already sharp puzzle working skills) is that we do not get to go paddle boarding. For the uninitiated, paddle boarding is not a fraternity prank for future CIA operatives, although water and boards are involved, for that matter drowning could be involved also. No, paddle boarding involves standing up on a plank of buoyant foam filled plastic resins and paddling with a long double bladed paddle. So basically, it is kayaking without the benefits and comfort of sitting down. It is water sport for evangelical Christians. I know I digress but why can’t the evangelicals just sing from a sitting position. I tithe so that the church doesn’t have to scrimp on the padding for the pews. So we get the cushy chairs, and I have to stand up for all of the songs. Why not stand up for the sermon? Keep the minister on his toes; concerned that I may just go ahead and walk out if he gets a bit long winded. Where was I? Oh yeah standing up while paddling across the water. What do we have some sort of Messiah complex? “Look at me. From a distance it looks like I am walking on water.” For 50 years, I was told “don’t stand up in a canoe, the row boat; basically any small human powered water craft.” Officer safety demonstrated that at  the beginning of every camp season. He showed us how easy it was to tip a canoe over by standing up. Now, through the miracle of modern flotation we can stand up on a board that does not even have a keel? I don’t think so.

Which is why, for the record, I do not endorse paddle boarding. I basically have a hate, hate relationship with bodies of water larger than a hot tub. Until I or my offspring develop gills, I will continue to be leery around bodies of water.

I know that my father and my grandmother are to blame. The farm that I grew up on and continue to grow old on has a spring fed gravel pit. The farm North of Ingalls was close to Interstate 69. During its construction, they needed vast amounts of gravel to create the road bed. As the civil engineers started work on each new section they would scour the nearby country side for supplies that were easy to dig and close to the road construction so that trucking costs could be kept down. So during the late 50’s and through the 60’s, several different gravel companies came a calling and dug a big hole 300 yards north of my grandmother’s house. The glaciers were generous and left a very deep and long vein of gravel “just over the hill.” 

I can still remember the huge dragline swinging his bucket out over the hole, letting the cable play out, the weight of the bucket carrying it out and over the pit. The operator through years of practice able to land the 5 yard bucket within inches of its next mouthful of gravel after swinging through a 100 degree arc, 90  feet out in the pit after falling 50 feet. He could do it every time. My dad loved to take us down the hill. They would run long into the night. The smell of the diesel, the roar of the huge engines with the heat warming the cockpit on cold late autumn nights are all memories that flood back to me as bright as the lights that were used to light the entire gravel mining operation.

Like all good things, veins of gravel must come to an end sometime. This one did. 50 feet below the surface of the of the pit’s rim, the excavators hit limestone. It was thick and the bottom of an old crustacean filled lake or pond or ocean or something. Not being geologist, the quarrymen were sure that more gravel lay just beyond the barrier. Filling the bucket with boulders to make it more effective, the crane operator started banging away. Soon the barrier was broken and thousands of gallons of water came pouring into the hole. Within a few days, the water reached the level of the underground cavern that fed the spring; Leaving 20 ft banks on the gravel pit, a good old swimming hole about 30 ft deep, and ancestors who were sure that their scions would wander down over the hill, jump in and surely drown.

In order to keep that eventuality from playing itself out, my father, with the help of successive hired hands commenced operation “scare the B-Jesus out of the little kids.” They made up elaborate stories for gullible six year olds that “those bubbles rising to the surface were from underwater gnomes who had wheelbarrows and were mining rocks and gravel up and down from the bottom of the pond, and if they caught you, they would tie your legs together and drag you down to the deep and horrible crushing depths and you would never be recovered.” Of course, that would never work for middle school kids. So it became the long tendrils of pond weeds that would wrap around your legs if you ever jumped in and keep you from surfacing.

These are lessons that were taken to heart. Taken to heart so strongly in fact that to this day after 52 years, I have never so much as dipped a toe into a great swimming pond just over the hill from my grandmother’s house. Thankfully, I did not transfer the boogie man to my children and the lovely Miss Beverly was able to spend many hours in the gravel pit with them. The gravel is long gone and I have traveled 782 miles to the shore of another lake in which I am not going swimming.

Take care,

Roger.