Springtime brought an end to road hockey. The road hockey rink so carefully groomed all winter long began to slush up during the day and harden each night as the evening spring temperatures fell below freezing. This process continued for several weeks gradually baring the tar based roadway. Roads and the potholes in them filled with icy water by day and skinned over with ice by night. Some days it took considerable heel bashing to break through the night's ice-making activities. In the morning the challenge was to see if you could walk across the ice before it cracked and you broke through. On the way home from school at the end of the day, the challenge was to get through the now ice-free puddle without mishap. Beside seeing how deep you could go into the puddles without either falling or getting a soaker, we would build enormous dams to trap the abundance of water rushing down the street.
The small rise in the road just above our house was filled with opportunity. Water from the school yard up the street migrated to the edge of Harcourt Street and headed down toward the low point below. Engineers were to be discovered on that two hundred foot stretch of Harcourt Street.
There was only one storm drain in that particular area. There hadn't been any until the town finally installed two grates to prevent all the run-off from the upper part of the street from draining through our basement in its quest to reach low land. Before the drain was dug, all the spring run-off would reach the dip in the road in front of number 50 and gather until it reached sufficient depth to leak into the snow in our front yard and find its way into our basement. This seepage was amplified whenever a car came down the street and regardless of how slowly the car traveled to move through the artificial lake, it pushed the lagoon water to the side. As the nearly buoyant vehicle forded its way down the street, the waves created would push the water sideways to our front lawn where it continued its search for lower land.
If that didn't make my parents unhappy then there was the challenge of our walking through the water which by now covered the full width of the road with pants pulled up to the top of rubber boots. Success in crossing the road was measured by the dryness of your boots because the water did get quite high there despite my father's many efforts to channel it down by our house. Another problem found in walking across this temporary pond was the ice that was created on the bottom where the freezing water met the frozen road. For the unlucky, the first dip of the spring came sooner than expected. Part of the game was to memorize just where the icy parts were and refuse to tell the challenger. Town council finally bent to the neighborhood pressure to put an end to the annual lake and sent a crew of workers to oversee the installation of storm sewers that would send the run-off into the underground to join the cement pipes they had laid across our back yard.
The municipality, along with the many parents on the street, was certain that this new water route would spoil our fun. We had other ideas. We planned ways to use the drain that was installed to spoil our fun. At first, we would conveniently block the two grates by building a huge coffer dam around each using mounds of wet, icy snow. If we got them to last through the night when the temperature dropped enough to harden the slush, we were able to capture even more run-off and send it off to the now dry lake bed in front of my house.
When our parents caught on to this game, we resorted to building a series of dams up the side of the sloping roadway, beginning at the top of the hill. As we moved down the street, each successive dam would be even larger and stronger than the one just above it. This would continue until we were just short of the two storm drain openings. The formidable task was to see how much we could hold back with each dam. When they were all built and reinforced we'd start at the top letting the stored water go. Whose dam would hold the longest and the most?
The flood would hit the first dam, join the lake already formed and force that dam apart. This would continue until all the artificial lakes became one and the accumulated slush and water would smash against the dam circling the grate. This mixture of snow and water would fill the grate. The emulsion would, by sheer volume, block the drain and form the sought after lake. Frantically, the adults would emerge from their houses, shovels in hand to clear the grates of slush and send the build up of water rushing safely down the drain.
By the time the adults had begun clearing the slop and releasing the over-flow of slush filled water, we had disappeared around the corner of my house to make our way to our back yard to see if we could reach where the gray pipe reappeared from under our yard. The sudden rise in the volume of water was nearly as satisfying as building the dam itself. The surge of water shot out into the stream bed in the yard next to ours. We had created a miniature Niagara in our back yard. Occasionally we would get small sticks through the grate and bet on which one would win the race to the end. When the snow on the side of the road had finished its time and dams could no longer be constructed and all that remained were the few piles in the field near the rickety rink, we resorted to sending our racing craft from one end of the drain to watch it shoot out the other end of the underground water course.
Each spring when the water is starting to gather at the end of my
driveway, I dig , whether it needs it or not, little channels down the side of
the road and when I'm sure that no one is looking, I make a dam to see how much
water I can hold back.
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