Fun with Water

The final two incidents both involved water – and although they are somewhat funny now, they didn’t necessarily seem so at the time. Gee – six memorable incidents in the same week!

There was a stream flowing through the far side of the campground. Having access to such cool (even cold) water during a hot summer day in NH was a real treat. The stream took a sharp bend and that is where the swimming area was located. As with many such sharp bends, the inside of the bend is shallow and the camp owners had dumped a quantity of sand that formed a sloping beach and then continued down the slope under the water. It was good for kids, but younger kids had to be watched because it dropped off relatively quickly and the stream was quite swift flowing. The far side of the bend the stream had cut into the bank and so it dropped off into fairly deep water and the bottom was very muddy. If you were right along the edge you could still touch bottom though and the “older” kids would swim to that side.

As stated in the last part, I was almost 15, so my sister Beth was 13 and my younger siblings were 8, 6, and 5. They were too young to do much but splash on the near (sandy) side, but Beth and I were both competent swimmers. She and a few other kids about the same age had gone to the far side and had stepped in the muddy bottom (mud up to mid-calf!) But when they came back to the beach they had a horrifying discovery – the mud was a breeding ground for leeches (blood suckers)! They all had quantities of them stuck to their lower legs.

Anyone who knows anything about leeches knows that they will cling tightly, attach their mouth parts to you, and begin sucking blood out of your body until they have their fill, then drop off of their own accord (that’s why they were used medicinally in times past – for bloodletting). These were all very small ones – perhaps ¼ to ½ inch long. But for a 13-year old girl to have several of them clinging to her legs it was not very pleasant. Fortunately, there is a quick solution – and one that both I and my mother knew. The way to get them off is NOT to try pulling them – they stick much too tightly. Instead just sprinkle some salt on them. The irritation and the salt drawing the liquid from the leech’s body makes them curl up and let go as they die from the effect. So we did this – but it also stopped all the kids from swimming to the far side of the stream for the rest of the week.

The final incident involved horseshoes. I was pretty much into that sport at the time and discovered that the owner had an informal horseshoe pit on the side of the camp nearest the entrance. I threw a few shoes and quickly realized that the stakes were too close together. Regulation is 40’, so I pulled out one of the stakes, paced off 40’ and began pounding it back in, using the horseshoes as my “hammer”. I hadn’t gone far when suddenly water began bubbling up out of the ground around the stake. Digging around the stake I was horrified to discover that I had pierced a 2” plastic water line – going right in one side of the PVC and out the other side. It turned out that the main water line for the camp came from the “store” and ran back along the dirt lane to the camp to feed the bathrooms, etc.

My father drove out to the camp store, the owner temporarily shut off the water to the camp, then he came out, dug up around the stake that I had pounded through the line, cut off that section and put in a small splice to repair it. No permanent damage done, but it was still quite embarrassing to me. If I’d been even a half inch to one side or the other, the stake would have slid off the PVC, but I managed to hit it dead center and go right through it. We decided to move both stakes about 5-6’ to one side to prevent future incidents!

Six memorable incidents in a single week – a bonfire, the death of my grandmother, two romances, leeches, and a water line! Would you have remembered all of them over 50 years later?