Fecal Regatta Redux

I had no story for today so I recalled one of my favorite stories that I have already done. I deleted the extraneous parts, that on second read I didn't like, and distilled it down to just the real poop.

As summer up north is winding down, and I see that the kids are all going back to school, it reminded me of summers when I was a kid and the games we played. One of my favorite summer games was the ’Fecal Regatta’. The Fecal Regatta, was a boat race that was held in the creek that ran through my home town. My brother and his friends would build small boats out of two by fours and other wood scraps, then launch them in the creek near the middle of town. I was on my brothers team and my duty was to run ahead and make sure the boat kept flowing freely with the current. Sometimes this involved stepping into the creek and nudging the boat free from what it had been snagged on.

Back in the nineteen fifties, our town had no sewage treatment facilities, no separate sewer line for storm runoff and no separate sewer line for household sewage. Every time you flushed a toilet, your turds and whatever else you threw in there went directly to the creek that flowed through town. Directly to the creek that we played in. Those ‘snags’ our toy boats got caught on, sometimes were not fallen branches but the raw sewage that we had flushed out of our subdivision that morning. There was also the occasional ‘balloon’ floating along with our boats, at least that's what my brother told me. Balloons? They were huge, bloated things, and all I could think was, where do you get such neat balloons? It was later in life that I found out they sold them in a machine at the corner gas station.