Sidebar: Since I've been away from this blog awhile, and because we celebrated Mother's and Father's days recently, I've been getting nostalgic remembering my past. I know I promised to write more about our family in my preteen and teenage years (when my youngest sister's remember the houses and events), but seeing Cherie last weekend awakened more of the California stories in my brain. So I may skip around a little.
I typed in our Talbot Drive address on Google Maps and got a virtual tour of our entire street as it looks today. The first thing I noticed is how small the front yard of our house is. It seemed very spacious when we lived there, with two areas - a square by the front door lined in split-rail fence, and the bigger part of the yard that contained the olive tree. The tree is still there, but I couldn't see any others that I could identify as olive trees on the street. So the children who live there today probably have limited, if any, olive battles - poor kids.
I was thinking about an area we kids called Coyote Creek. Located about a block away from the end of Talbot Drive, Coyote Creek was really just a drainage ditch next to the end of a golf driving range. And it was not a good place for kids to play. But we loved to get old mayonaise jars and fill them with murky water loaded with tadpoles (or pollywogs, as we called them). It only made sense to take off our shoes and wade in the cold water, where we could wiggle our toes in the cool, mushy mud. One day, Cherie managed to cut her foot (badly!) on a big piece of glass while wading. My mom was furious (I've never seen her use so much peroxide and mercurochrome!) We were banned from tadpole hunting. If the adults only knew the mercury in all that mercurochrome was worse than anything growing in Coyote Creek!
In the 1960's, a real concern in Southern California was flash flooding. Hugh concrete flood-water systems were constructed around many neighborhoods connecting in a web that stretched across Los Angeles county. Coyote Creek was eventually connected into this network. At the end of our ditch, a large pipe was sunk straight down, about 5 or 6 feet. To keep animals (and I suppose children) from getting into the pipe, a metal-cage dome was built on the top. It was all connected to a long, underground, horizontal pipe that ended in a giant, cement drainage channel about the size of a four-lane highway. When you walked up the channel, you'd find that it connected at intervals with other channels. The floor of these trenches were at least 50 feet deep.
It was a great adventure to wiggle ourselves between the dome cage, jump (or be lowered) down the vertical pipe, run through the next pipe (the scariest part) and come out in a world that looked like something from a sci-fi movie that stretched for miles.
If you've seen the movie Grease, the car race at the end takes place in exactly this type of trench. Sandy makes her decision to become a "tough girl" while sitting halfway up the side of the channel.
We would walk along these hugh drainage channels for hours! Sometimes we'd bring sandwiches and drinks so we could walk further than we had before. It was tricky because everything looked the same and getting lost was a real possibility. Every once in awhile, someone would climb up the side to make sure there were still houses and roads at the top. I remember walking to a place where stuff was thrown all over a large field-like area. It wasn't a dump, but maybe somewhere people dumped stuff? I thought it was where houses were torn down for new construction because it looked like everyday household items - kitchenwares, toys, clothes.
But the real danger was that these trenches were built for a reason - flash floods that could happen quickly. And if one occurred, we could become trapped and probably carried out to the Pacific Ocean. Although we already knew we shouldn't be fooling around there, we still did until my parents learned where we were going on our excursions. We were told to stay out of the drainage channels. But we still would sneak down occasionally.
Looking at Google maps today, you'd never know Coyote Creek ever existed. There is now a neighborhood of homes where the creek and driving range used to be. I couldn't find any of the drainage channels either. But that end of our neighborhood provided us with countless hours of exploration and imagination in the early 1960's.
Do you remember when the neighbor to the "dome" of the lower culvert part of the creek tuned in to us kids sneaking in and put up a deterrent of fish heads all along the chain link fence we climbed over? Scared us but didn't stop us. Also do you remember the "Indian Cave" carved into the slope that had storage and bunks carved into the back of it? It was always a hard climb to get to it but cool and private once you did. THIS is why I used to break the rules. It was all loose rock till on the slopes initially. The cement came after a winters worth of construction years after we started exploring there. It's probably all underground now. Barb and I used to walk on the huge pipes that connected across the top. That was probably the most dangerous thing we did. Lived to tell the tale!
ReplyDeleteWow! I thought that Indian Cave was something I dreamed up - never knew it was real. Don't really remember the fish heads, but if I know you and Barbie, you probably kept us away from that. And I remember the loose rock! Nobody ever wanted to go up to the top because it was so hard to walk up the slanted sides. I also remember it was always unbelievably hot when we walked, for what seemed like miles. But then, most of my memories of Talbot Drive are set in hot, hot weather.
DeleteGlad you commented - proves you can't make this stuff up! :)