Memories
Spillway
On the north side of town was a diversion ditch that ran along the east side of the airport and reconnects with the river to bypass the main river channel for flood runoff in the spring. The main body of the river wraps around the city and caused a lot of flooding in low areas of the city. The diversion ditch bypasses all but the extreme north part of the river. From the diversion ditch to the main channel junction was at least a 50 foot drop and the first system the city used to connect the diversion channel to the river was a concrete fixture with a 20 foot hole on top narrowing to a 12 foot hole on the bottom that dropped to a 12 ft round iron grate before it angled back to a horizontal decline which was a culvert like structure that ran to the main channel, bypassing the city. Anything falling that 50 feet plus to the grate below was smashed before it was washed through the grate and into the river channel. The stucture was dangerous even though the top of the concrete section was fenced off with barbed wire. If anything or anyone was in the water or had scaled the fence and fell in, they would be dead when they hit the bottom.
My brother Stan was a daredevil and was always doing things to show everyone how brave he was and how foolish he was. We would sometimes walk into town to go to a movie or just to shop or browse around downtown stores. It was his passion to show me how he could avert death and walk across the narrow concrete braces that crossed the top of the 'hole'. He would scale the fence on the way to town and walk across the concrete brace pretending in the middle that he had lost his balance. On the way home he would scale the fence and show how brave he was by running across the 6 in wide concrete beam. The 20 foot span didn't take a lot of time to cross but the exhileration he got from doing a death defying act gave him a satisfaction that I never could understand. It wasn't enough that he could run across the narrow beam, one day to my amazement, he lifted his bicycle over the fence and rode back and forth across the beams. I can't say my heart never skipped a beat when he would perform these crazy stunts and I think at the time I even admired in some weird way how he was able to set aside all rationality and flirt with death.
In the early 60's the city rebuilt the concrete structure and replaced the dangerous hole with a wide long concrete spillway. There was no more dangerous hole to fall into or to exhibit foolishness over, but it was to our understanding that they had put spikes at the bottom of the spillway to break up any debris that had gone over it. That never stopped Stan from trying some death defying stunt though. It wasn't a year after it was built that I watched as Stan was sliding down the spillway in a cardboard box laughing all yelling all the way down. |
