Back when our responsibilities consisted of cleaning our rooms and eating all our vegetables, my brother and I would spend the summers swimming in the Lucerne – a small canal – or ditch, as we called it – that cut a path near our home in rural Lingle.
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DISCLAIMER: Some readers may find descriptive imagery in the following piece to be disturbing. Read on at your own risk.
Back when our responsibilities consisted of cleaning our rooms and eating all our vegetables, my brother and I would spend the summers swimming in the Lucerne – a small canal – or ditch, as we called it – that cut a path near our home in rural Lingle. We would often park our bikes at one bridge and walk a mile or two to another, so after our long float downstream we had a quick way to get home and devour a frozen pizza, Ramen noodles or whatever other food we could find.
It wasn’t handy to wear shoes in the ditch, as they would often stick in the thick mud and slip off, so our feet were callused and scarred from walking barefoot on the hot asphalt and occasionally cutting ourselves on a piece of broken glass in the water.
Neither of us could swim very well, but the ditch was only a few feet deep in most spots, and our doggy-paddling did the job just fine.
We saw fish, snakes and spiders galore – and every once in awhile, something else.
One day, my brother and I were arguing, which was pretty common back then. We were swimming and I said something that upset Jake, and he dunked me.