As a teenager I envied Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and any other boy who lived close to a river or lake. We had only small creeks nearby. I longed to paddle a boat on a river and swim in a large body of water. Each spring my brothers, cousins, and I did our best to compensate for this handicap by building a pond.
When school let out for the summer, our thoughts turned to building a pond on one of the nearby creeks. Sometimes we cooled off by taking off our clothes and sitting on the Slick Rock in a creek on my Dad’s land. But the creek banks there were low and not suitable for building a pond. Our more successful ponds were made at Uncle Will Outen’s creek where the banks were about shoulder high to us at the time.
The building was done with several shovels. We took turns with the shovels, but we never got the creek shut off on the first day of work. There was too much dirt to move for that. Generally, on the first day we extended the dam from the two banks, leaving just room enough in the middle for the creek to flow. The next day when we were refreshed, we would complete the job.
The decision to shut off this flow of water was tense and dramatic. It meant that we were committed to the job of staying ahead of the rising water. If we failed to do that, the dirt piled up the previous day would be washed away. We worked steadily until the dam was high enough to make the water flow out the runaround or spillway that we had prepared on the bank.
Often the dam sagged as the water rose against it, because in our rush to make it high, we neglected to make it thick enough. When we planned ahead, we left a plentiful supply of dirt near the dam for the shutting off and staying ahead of the rising water.
Once the dam was sufficiently high, the runaround would carry the normal volume of the creek. Then the dam was threatened only when a thunderstorm caused the level of the creek to rise. After a thunderstorm, if the flow of the creek was too great for the runaround to carry it, the water running over the dam would break it.
But even without a rainstorm, there was danger that our new dam would sag and wash away that first night after we shut off the creek. On shutoff day plus one, we could hardly wait to see how the pond had faired during the night. Usually it stood glimmering and full, but on a few disappointing mornings, we rushed to the site only to see the small creek flowing through a broken dam.
Usually we continued to build on the dam every day after the pond had survived its first test. We broadened it and made a path across it. Our footpath on the dam served to pack the soil and provide a means of crossing and adding dirt to the dam. But before we put finishing touches to the dam, we took our first swim, being careful to avoid making waves that might splash across the top.
Throughout the summer we worked in the cotton fields or did some other kind of work in the morning. Then we took a quick lunch and ran from our house through the woods and across Outen’s pasture to the pond. In a week or so, we had worn a path.
After our first swim, we would make our way through the woods beyond the pond to the open fields of Loyd Goodnight’s farm. From the edge of the woods we could see Rick Wright’s June apple trees in the distance, about two hundred yards away. Next we surveyed the fields to see whether anyone was working there. If we saw anyone working, we passed along the gulley that split the fields in the direction of the trees. In the early years there were plum bushes along this gulley and these sometimes bore fruit.
But in June we filled our pockets with apples from Mr. Wright’s trees and carried them back to the pond and bobbed for apples as we swam. In the middle of the afternoon we reluctantly went back to work in the fields or to do some other task that Dad had set for us to do that day.
