Building Dams

(From 7/11/06 on my old blog)

When I was a little kid, I lived on a street in Lombard, Illinois that wasn’t paved. It was gravelly with no curbs. My parents bought the house on that street in 1965 when the house was new. Before buying it, they investigated the likelihood of the city paving the street and they were told that it was “in the plans”. My mother sold the house about 20 years later and the street still wasn’t paved.

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about when I lived there in the 60’s. When it rained, I was fascinated by the flow of the water down this street. It was different every time because the condition of the gravel would vary during the year. As people drove on it, the gravel would come and go; sometimes there would be more of it than other times. It was fun to play in when the water was flowing because you could build little dams and cause tiny floods. Eventually the water would overcome the little levees that I built. It was fun.

I am still fascinated by this same thing though I don’t play in the street anymore. On a recent business trip to California, I had the opportunity to head to the beach and poke around a bit. It was in the 50’s that day so I was only able to hike around and play “stay out of the water”. Hiking down the beach, lo and behold, I came to a little stream about 3 feet across that was feeding into the ocean. There was a bank of sand on one side of it. So I had to build a little dam – much larger than the efforts of 1967. I probably moved a couple hundred pounds of sand. It still only took a few minutes for the stream to overcome this. It was fun.

I wonder why I never became some kind of engineer who builds dams.