The Housatonic River

I just googled "Housatonic River", the name of the river I grew up on, and lo and behold, a picture of the exact area where I played (in all sorts of ways)for 2 decades pops up. This is the boat ramp down the hill from my elementary school, Sunnyside Elementary. There is a long, very steep road about 300 yards to the left that we used to ride our bikes down and ride straight into the river, rust be damned! I once rode in a shopping cart with two fat girls down that hill and it didn't end well. At all. Still got scars.

Anyway, here is my funniest story about this picture. It was January or February circa '76. I rode my bike full speed down the descent and veered to the left at right speed to avoid a wipeout. This was a skill that took some perfecting, because if you did it too slowly you wound up in a ditch, too fast and you wound up splayed and bloodied on the concrete just before the ramp. I had mastered this long ago and made the turn. I saw my 'boyfriend', staring toward the water. I approached and asked what he was doing. He told me that a few big kids had thrown his bike into the river and was trying to figure out how to get it, as he was kind of 'dressed up' and couldn't get dirty. Being the kind of boy that I was, I stripped off shoes, socks and pants and walked straight into the frigid water. Grabbed at the bike and pulled it out. WT...(back then, not as many F's)? It was a busted up piece of crap. As I turn around, he is doubled over laughing, riding away on his bike and screaming....."sucker!" I still have a valentine from him with a picture of a blonde tarzan and a brunette jane swinging from a vine. Ah, love in the 4th grade.

This river used to freeze over very frequently back then, but it becomes an estuary just a few miles from where I lived, which resulted in tides in the river. If the river froze at high tide, there would be gaps between the ice and the water, which made weak points in the ice. We were all forbidden to go onto the ice, but as we were thoroughly unsupervised, we didn't pay the warnings much mind. You couldn't truly ice skate, as the top was too bumpy, but you could walk across to the other side or shoe skate all over the joint. As a result, I fell through the ice into the water many times. The scariest time was when I fell through the ice and was carried by the current, under the ice roof for what seemed like forever, but was probably only 1/8th of a mile. My head popped up just directly to the left of the boat ramp in the picture. Scared, bruised and cold, but fine. My friends running along the bank to keep up with me. Naturally I was not going to go home with my clothes frozen stiff to my skin, so we go to my friends house. Her parents were never there, and we had full reign. Lit a fire in the wood burning stove, with my clothes ON the stove and started a fire. My clothes burned up, but we managed to keep the fire from burning the house down. I went home in her baggy clothes, got a few looks, but dodged a bullet. Looking back upon it, I dodged quite a few that day, and it's hilarious that the only bullet I was worried about was my parents being pissed. I hope Gilly is never as retotted as me.