“Good grief!” George screamed. “We’re swimming in raw sewage.”

During the summer of the 1947, two neighborhood friends, Roger and George, took me to the “dam,” a kid’s swimming hole not known to everyone in our small midwestern town. It was built across a 15-feet wide, waist-deep muddy creek called the Blue River one mile southeast of town. The dam stood three-feet high, built with heavy wooden planks attached to cement-anchored creosoted posts. A five-feet-long plank walkway lay haphazardly over the three-feet-wide spillway at its center. The farmer who built the dam irrigated his grain fields with its backwaters.

Just below the dam, a 40-feet diameter pool formed. It was chest-deep in the middle. Further downstream, the pool gradually narrowed back into the creek. This pool was our summer swimming hole, that is, for those of us locals who dared to use it, mostly boys. On its east side, a large overhanging cottonwood branch gave us a bag swing from which we splash-landed into the pool many times. That tree also gave us much needed shade. Sunburn came easily during those hot summer days.

Roger, George, and I were each 10 at the time. As summer buddies that year, we often walked to the dam barefoot. We carried our swimsuits, changing into them on arrival. Skinny-dipping happened occasionally, too, when we were in that area for other reasons, like, fishing, hiking, or camping. To get there from the access road, we had to cross a wildly grown pasture of dandelions, sunflowers, and milkweeds. We carefully stayed on a narrow grass-trampled path through it, else our ankles and feet got scratched by thorny things. We could hear the spillway, and smell the creek’s muddy banks before we got there, a mossy or wet-leaves smell.

One mild day, while swimming there, Roger suggested that we slowly float or wade downstream from the pool. It’s something we hadn’t done before. We did. About 150-feet downstream, George suddenly asked, “Why is the bottom getting so deep and mushy? It’s not hard like the dams? It feels like coffee grounds.” Roger chuckled to himself.

“What are those dark things floating there?” I asked, wiping the creek water from my eyes. “Are they what they look like?”

“Maybe, they’re floaters,” Roger said, grinning.

“Good grief!” George screamed. “We’re swimming in raw sewage. Look, there!” He pointed. “It’s coming out of that big pipe on the bank.”

“Oh my gosh!” I said, spitting out any possible creek water. I scrambled toward the opposite bank ahead of George and Roger. “I didn’t know that was there.”

“Me neither,” said George. Roger said nothing.

A few years later, that sewage pipe was replaced with a large modern treatment plant. It’s creek effluent is now clean and pure. In the meantime before then, we chose not to swim downstream anymore. However, we continued to fish for those exceptionally large bullheads.