The Dam River Rats

I remember the year my friends and I were in the 8th grade with great clarity. And horror. That was the year we regularly fished up on the river below the dam on the weekends. Of course we had no way to get there, but there was a guy in the neighborhood named Mac who was a few years older than us, and he had a driver’s license. 

Now, high schoolers and junior high schoolers didn’t normally hang out together because that was just, well, wrong. It was an unwritten social code.

But there are times that Nature allows species to coexist for mutual benefit. Both we and Mac loved to fish. Mac had a car and dated girls, so he was always broke. We had lawn cutting and paper route money and nothing much to spend it on. He provided the transportation, and we provided the gas. Mutual benefit.

Now, when I say Mac had a “car,” I use the word reluctantly. It was more akin to an unarmed tank. If you’ve never seen a 1950 Nash Metropolitan, look it up on the internet. You’re in for a treat. It resembles a giant turtle and is completely devoid of any aesthetic qualities whatsoever. The only way it could have been any uglier is if it was painted lime green. Mac’s was. How he ever got a girl to get in that thing is beyond my power of comprehension.

However, for transporting kids to the river, it was perfect. Mac had somewhat customized his lime green turtle. He removed the back seat and the partition to the trunk, laid down half-inch plywood and upholstered it with seat cover material. At the time, we couldn’t imagine why he did that, but we loved it. Since he was short for his age and drove with the seat all the way up, there was an enormous amount of room in the back. 

It could have slept eight adults or 16 kids comfortably. On the way to the dam, Mac had a little trick that he did with the Nash. He would jerk the steering wheel one-quarter turn and immediately release it. On its own, the car would go into a swaying motion for a couple of hundred yards until it corrected itself. I don’t think that was an intentional safety feature of the vehicle, but I could be wrong. To six kids in the back, it was like a ride at the state fair. We would tumble and roll from one side to the other, completely helpless, laughing and giggling all the while.

It wasn’t really as dangerous as it sounds. The thing had to weigh about six tons, and even if it had rolled over, we would have been safe. I saw one hit a city dump truck head on once. The grill of the truck was completely destroyed and the front tires flattened. The Metropolitan suffered a scratch on one headlight cover. 

One Saturday, we rock and rolled our way up to the river. That was the day we came up with a name for ourselves: The Dam River Rats. The name was perfect. It smacked of renegades, bravado and reckless obscenity, yet we couldn’t be accused of cursing. 

Our maturity and intellect were something to behold.

When we got there that fateful day, there was only one gate open on the dam, and the river was barely 50 yards across. It was about 300 yards to the riverbed from the parking area at the top, and the first half of that was just a few degrees off of perfectly vertical. It was unseasonably hot that day, and we actually broke into a sweat climbing down.

That was surprising, because I don’t think kids the age of the Dam River Rats had sweat glands. We had been raised in the Deep South without air conditioners. Most of us didn’t even have a window fan in the house. So no one perspired until you started dating or filled out your first W-2 form. By the time we negotiated what was laughingly referred to as a trail down that cliff, desperately clinging to the kudzu to keep from plunging to certain death, we were soaking wet. Someone in our little group later told me that gave them an ominous premonition. I don’t know, kids lie a lot. 

But it felt good to get to the relative cool of the rocks and boulders that comprised the second half of our journey sloping down to the water. We walked and climbed our way down to a residual pool of about a half acre directly on the face of the dam. Standing there looking up at that huge structure was truly awesome.

It was the largest man-made edifice any of us had ever seen at the time. We felt how Dorothy must have felt staring up at the throne of Oz. And there was the roar of rushing water to our right and the mind-numbing buzz of the generators inside the structure. It was almost a religious experience. The pool was chock full of big blue cats, and we baited with minnows or worms and began pulling them in every other cast. There were a couple of huge stripers trapped in there and someone hung one and it promptly broke his line. Like I say, it was almost heaven. Until the warning horn blew.

The sound was quite unmistakable as it could be heard 8 miles downstream and rendered anyone in the immediate vicinity temporarily deaf. It meant the gates would be opening in 10 minutes, and we had to quit fishing and head for high ground. Quickly. But this day, either the engineer had suffered a stroke and forgotten how to tell time, or the Great and Powerful Oz was playing with us. Before we even had a chance to reel in, the quiet pool in which we were fishing became a violent maelstrom. A veritable tidal wave from four open gates hit each of us at the knees and waist, according to our height.

Bait, minnow buckets, two stringers of catfish, all gone. In unspeakable panic, rods and reels were either dropped or actually thrown, perhaps in hopes of appeasing the river gods. We were like ants in a bathtub. Though hysterical to the point of insanity, we still had enough sense to instinctively head up the slope.

I glanced around and saw everyone’s eyes were bugged out like cartoon characters but were blind with pure terror. Mac, by far the oldest and most wise of us, screamed, “We’re all gonna dieeeeeeeeeee!” So you can imagine the state of mind (and I use that term loosely) the rest of us were in. Personally, I never doubted Mac for a moment.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with them, river rocks have a peculiar attribute. When they are dry, they have a flaky film that actually serve as an adhesive and are easy to walk on. When a drop of water touches them, however, they become as slick as an eel dipped in Crisco. So in our quest to achieve the kudzu cliff, we waded, fell, climbed, fell, stood, fell, sloshed, fell, splashed, fell, gurgled, fell, swam, sank, rose and fell again. That’s when the lightning hit a transformer on the dam. 

Mac repeated his admonition, “We’re all gonna dieeeeeeeeee!” 

What Mac lacked in stature, he made up for in volume. It was at that point that I gave up all hope of survival. I think I simply dismissed reality as something I could not deal with at the time because I distinctly remember being concerned that my wallet was wet. Now, a 13-year-old has no more need of a wallet than an old man has of track shoes. All that was in mine was my lucky $2 bill, a folded-up really bad report card that never made it home, and a school picture of the ugliest girl in my math class.

This particular young lady had the habit of writing notes to me every day. You know the kind: “I like you. Do you like me? Yes or no. Mark the square.” I never answered, but I was happy to have her write to me, as a distraction. Anything was better than math. And once, she passed said picture in one of the notes. I could not understand why the most unattractive  member of the opposite sex was interested in me. It never occurred to me that water seeks its own level.

Speaking of which, we somehow finally managed to reach the kudzu at the high water mark and clung breathlessly to it, skinned, battered and bruised, sincerely surprised to be alive. It was still lightning, but we were out of the water. It became apparent that the storm, which we couldn’t see coming because the dam was in the way, had roared down the lake, dumping untold tons of water and causing them to open the gates so abruptly. 

With sudden courage, borne of new found safety, someone scoffed at Mac, “I thought we were all gonna die.” 

Though Mac’s prognostication had been incorrect, he was still smarter than the rest of us. He simply replied, “You wanna walk home?” No one else chose to say anything.

We never went back to the river, and The Dam River Rats disbanded. We did found another organization though. The Dang BB Bangers. But that’s another story.