The Elkhorn Creek

It has been way too long since I've written. By way of excuse, we've been traveling a good bit. But I've missed it and hope to do better. There are lots of ideas in the future blog entry hopper.

Looking at where we grew up, this one is hard to believe. I've also hesitated a little about this entry because I'm not sure how to make it funny. In the end, however, getting the story out is more important to me than provoking laughter.

Check out the dam in our back yard; it was about a 10 foot drop down.
There are a lot of dams on the Elkhorn. Chuck Ellis and I canoed from our house to Frankfort as a high school senior project; we had to portage around the places where the creek drops. The dam in our back yard was also why the creek was deep upstream. That let us have the tire swing - see Kim the delightful child story. There will be a story in the future about another bridge over the creek and certainly more about jumping into the creek from the tire swing.
Every two or three years, the creek would flood. It happened a little more often than it froze in winter. That's part of why the dance hall in the flat back yard was elevated. See the snack bar as it still stood in 1980.

When I'm talking flood, I'm talking about water sometimes up as high as the white boards you see on the snack bar across that very wide area.

Just like we got the pool table because Uncle Hall needed it out of his basement for a while, we got a canoe through some special deal with a local man whose name escapes me that did a lot of canoeing. We enjoyed it during regular creek elevations and even took it on the aforementioned senior project.

Let me digress a bit. As I have aged, I have been white water rafting several times. I have pictures of going in 1984 with MA, then with
Eleanor (2003)

and Caroline (2006).


Note that both my girls seemed to enjoy it considerably more than my wife. When herself and I went with our Sunday School class from Peachtree Pres, she was thinking only of the social aspects. She was a wonderful new bride. It came as quite a surprise that there was actual water and even danger involved. On the trip on the bus upstream, after the guide said when you fall out, MA thought she was going to die. Despite our financial situation, she told me that if she survived, I would have to go to Needless Markup and buy her a dress. It's a pretty floral and she wore it holding Eleanor.
Here is Eleanor in that self-same dress some 18 years later.

Back to the main story. The most interesting and inexplicable use of the canoe was one heavily flooded afternoon in the spring of 1978 (my junior year in high school). TGP decided that we should run the dam when the water was so high that there was no dam. I'm very sorry (for me as much as for you) that I don't have a picture of a flood, but picture the water pretty much flat where you would expect the 10 foot drop. Actually, it wasn't flat, but had a 3 foot drop followed by a 3 foot rise. The general water level was flat from above the dam to below the dam. We put in a few hundred yard upstream, near my cousin Bryan's cabin. I was up front, wearing the life jacket and paddling like hell (think back to the whitewater pictures above). When we hit the dam, the canoe when down the 3 feet, and the angle of the canoe never recovered. When we came up, we were almost at the bridge from which this picture was taken, to give you a sense of the distance.
Somehow, we pulled the canoe over to the side and got out. We walked all the way back over the bridge and back up to the house, coughing, sputtering and laughing the whole way up. I can't imagine how Muv felt watching that adventure.

The canoe made it to Charleston when we moved, but wasn't used in the harbor where the Ashley and the Cooper meet to form the Atlantic. I think TGP ended up giving it away to someone else in the Navy.

I guess this goes in the "Gee, it's great that we survived our childhood" category. In fact, it is a great story because it makes me smile. I wouldn't do that with my girls, but it is fun to remember.