My days spent in those little streams of Story City are some of the fondest memories I have. But even in that little stretch of watery paradise the Great Dark Tunnel was always threatening with the gurgling calls of drowning children.

I started my maritime adventures catching crawdads with my little friend Aaron in his back yard section of the crick. I’m not sure who gave us the idea but I now suspect somebody in the nearby adult world wanted some free fishing bait. We spent many a muddy afternoon in those waters in our first few years of school.

After all, there was really nothing else. We had a crick or a fairly spartan playground at the elementary school by today’s standards, a swimming pool during the hottest days of the summer and bicycles. We all had many friends though. Ryan, Travis, and Donald were all in the neighborhood, along with Alicia whos parent’s eggplants I once used as short lived basketballs and the crazy kid who once threatened us with a stabbing if we didn’t get off his sidewalk.

The crick was a place of adventure for most of us. We all knew that it could sweep us up whenever God told it to and carry us off to the Skunk River to be drowned. What greater thrill could it be then to stand in the water and defy nature in those years where our little selves could deny no authority of any kind!

We would launch small armadas of paper boats down the gentle currents, following their progress and watching them sink on the slightest of rapids.

If we were really lucky we could follow our well made paper boats all the way to the end of the earth, at the Great Dark Tunnel. This monstrosity was a gaping mouth in the side of a wall of earth much taller than any of us at the time, into which we could peer and see only blackness and shadows. Nothing that entered it ever escaped. It was certain that if God did stir up the waters, this would be the last place we would ever see the light of day.

So we decided that the solution to the menace of the Great Dark Tunnel was to dam the crick and save any errant soul, or paper boat at least, from being sucked down into its serrated maw.

It was not a small project. We had practiced damming the crick in smaller areas many times before, with some temporary success. But this was big.

We came to the park every afternoon and worked the edges of the crick finding the largest stones, carrying them down to a shallower area by the Great Dark Tunnel, stacking them up in a U shape because somebody had seen a picture of the hoover dam and it looked like that. Of course, their memory was a little skewed and we had built the dam inverted. But that was no matter, it still began to grow and water started to run over and through the big rocks, silt filling them in as it went.

After many afternoons of rock hauling and careful engineering meetings, finally the reservoir we had created in the crick was deeper than we were tall. We had done it, we had stopped most of the flow of the crick into the Great Dark Tunnel. It seemed to sneer at us from its drying mouth, but we then sneered back as the conquerors that we were. Lords of the Elements.

We naturally slapped the dirt off our hands, hopped on our bikes and went home to our dinners most satisfied with our victory against the tides of God and nature.

The next morning it was in the paper. “City park becomes City Lake,” was the headline more or less.

Other than to a hopefully forgiving God in our prayers at night, we never mentioned it again.