The Fecal Regatta (2020 rewrite)

I was thinking about my childhood yesterday and I remembered something I call 'The Fecal Regatta’. It was a boat race that was held in the creek that ran through Tinley Park. No, not like big boats. My older brother, Dave and his friends would build small toy boats out of two by fours and other wood scraps, then launch them in the creek near the middle of town. There would be two man teams, each with their own little boat. 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 home town of Tinley Park 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 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 turd that had left the Parkside subdivision just the day before. They gave the town creek a certain aroma that I remember to this day. Besides those crap clogs, there was also an occasional white ‘balloon’ floating along with our boats. I always wondered what kids party those 'balloons' had come from and how come I hadn't been invited to that party.