Simultaneously, some of us are painfully dragging through life in slo-motion, wishing it didn’t hurt so much. Some of us are sailing through life, having fun, at an exhilarating pace. It seems we would have been well-informed about the potential for joy, but it follows that we would have been warned about the potential for trials, struggles and hardship as well.Īnd here we are. I can’t help but wonder how much we understood about what this mortal existence would entail before we came here. Looking back, it feels a lot like life: Sometimes life can be exhilarating and move at lightning speed, other times, life clobbers you in the back of the head and drags you – face down – across corrugated steel in slo-motion. Such was the adventure we called “Shooting the Tube.” I clambered to the shore and sat there, catching my breath and composure. The guys came racing around the other side, whooping and hollering about how crazy it was. It was the longest 20 seconds of my life. I “shot the tube” face down on corrugated pipe. One of the loose boards clobbered me in the back of the head, causing me to fall forward. The pressure of the water burst through the makeshift dam and came roaring into the tube. They were never able to pull the boards away, but physics did it for them. Since the opening to the culvert was essentially covered, we couldn’t communicate with the others, so we waited. So a couple of us ran around and climbed up the culvert and took our spots and waited.Īpparently, the water pressure was such that the guys were having trouble pulling the boards away. As the water rose, we realized that if we didn’t pull the boards soon, the water would flood over the road. I recall one time when we were seeing how high we could get the water to back up to increase the pressure. Then we would trade places, and dam up the water again, and wait. The pent-up water would flood into the culvert with remarkable force, pushing those on the inside through the culvert and out the other side. When the water rose high enough, the people manning the dam would pull the boards away from the opening. We would sit in the emptied corrugated culvert and wait. (I don’t know if it is even there or accessible anymore.) But I found a photo that give the general idea from a place in Salt Lake called Tanner Park. The culvert was maybe five feet tall, and made of corrugated steel. Some of us would stay behind and man the dam, while others would then run across the road, climb down to the steam bed and run back up the culvert to the dam – from the inside. The dammed up water would form a small, temporary lake, the force of which would put more and more pressure on the blockade. In order to “Shoot the Tube,” my friends and I would take pieces of plywood or abandoned road signs and stop up the water flow at the entrance to the culvert. The road was narrow, so the culvert probably ran under the road 40-50 feet before it emerged into a shallow pool of water. Near the entrance to the park, the stream ran under the road, through a culvert. It grew during the run-off season as the snow in the upper elevations would melt. (The following is from memory, so if anything is not exactly right, I blame age.) We also did our snow camps there as Scouts. You could leave opening exercises and be building a campfire for your s’mores ten minutes later. We went up there countless times for mutual and Scout activities. It was a young boy’s paradise, and super convenient. There were picnic sites, a stream, places to hike, wild rhubarb, and even an occasional fish. (It is still there – canyons don’t move around a lot.) It was beautiful. As summertime is upon us, it brought back memories of one of those crazy fun things we did as kids…the kind of things that Mom and Dad didn’t need to know about.Ī few miles behind my house there was a small canyon and picnic area called Mueller Park. It looked a lot the same, and it triggered all sorts of nostalgia. Last week, two of my kids drove past the house I grew up in in Bountiful, Utah and sent me a picture.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |