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| Low rent waterslide. |
Something that you don't see much in civilized cities is open irrigation ditches. I think that is a direct robbery by adults from the joy of childhood in favor of safety.
We had so much fun playing in the irrigation ditch, riding down and making pools dug to the side of the ditch and then lined with a tarp. Wading knee-deep through the water and floating down the ditch, the possibilities for fun were limitless. When irrigation would come every 10 days we would have our own swimming pool. It was a 12” deep irrigation swimming pool, pretty nice. Other kids did not have rich stuff like that. To my knowledge, there was only one family in town that had a real swimming pool so we were in rarefied waters.
We were irrigation millionaires, we were rich, how many millionaires had the fun of an open irrigation ditch at their disposal? Very few, I can assure you, very, very, few. It is their loss. I'm sure they could buy one if they even thought of it, but that is how depraved they are, they don't even know how lucky they aren't. Tragic.
Sometimes we even put tadpoles that we caught in the pool and it would dry out and kill them all. Besides mass frog-icide, we did something very dangerous, I'm still surprised nobody died or got hurt, we rode under the road in the water. As the ditches pass under the roads they went through an 18” pipe that would go from one side of the road the other. Brave kids would get in the ditch water upstream of the road and make their bodies a plug by spreading out their arms and legs then the ditch water would push them down the pipe. Then they would shoot out the other end. Being young, we had no idea how that could go wrong. As an adult I am horrified that we were going underneath the road in a pipe full water where the tiniest mistake would jam us in an underground pipe and drown us.
Maybe ignorance is bliss, it certainly made it more fun.
