Jul. 08, 2003 - 17:50 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

So Called

About eight or ten blocks from where I lived as a kid the Platte River flowed past. It is a shallow stream most of the time and shallower yet through the summer.

We had found several spots nearby where it was deep enough for us to paddle around and one deep enough to do a bit of actual swimming. That is if too many of us weren't trying to all swim at once, you might say that close quarter swimming took a little skill.

Water fighting abounded and the bottom had this squidgy, sticky mud that fitted itself well to mud slinging fights, sort of prepared us for what we encountered in reading about politics later on.

On the whole though that small spot gave us a pleasant and cooling way for us to pass the time. It sure beat riding the hot, old street car to town to the YMCA to get yelled at in the chlorinated pool.

Even back then though our parents, had they known, would have totally come unglued and strong discipline would have taken place in our ranks. We kids knew the river was muddy and silty and sometimes trash would float by but, "What the heck it was river water fresh out of our mountains." We had no idea of the effluent flowing into the river upstream from where we played. We were lucky though, other than having a stone bruise or a dot of mud in the eye now and then we fell not ill of one plague or another.

It had one great advantage over all the places we could swim -- it was unsupervised. To a kid like me that meant a lot. Basically I didn't take the time to doubt authority, I fled from it. My bunch seemed to feel the same.

We never spent a whole day there but it was a grand place to cool off at our old swimmin' hole, So Called . . . . . . .

Blog