10 May 2018

I Lost Part of My Childhood!

Early on the morning of Friday last, 4 May, I lost a part of my childhood. My Sister told me in a phone call earlier that the dam on the Big Blue River at Marysville, KS collapsed.


The Big Blue has been dammed at this point for over 150 years. The first dam was built by 'Captain' Perry Hutchinson in 1864 and the dam that collapsed was finished in the 1920s. It had powered Captain Hutchinson's flour mill and then was used for generating electricity, but had been unused, industrially, since 1967, shortly after I left Marysville. On a personal note, my Father, Perry Weismiller, was named for Perry Hutchinson.

I learned to swim in the quiet pool below the dam, and I spent many a warm summer's afternoon sitting atop the dam, with a fishing line dangling into the pool below. If it had rained upstream and there was water going over the dam, instead of through the turbines in the building in the picture, it was an exciting adventure to walk across it. You could still fish from it if the water wasn't too swift, but you needed a bucket to sit on if you didn't want your trousers completely soaked! 

There is (or was? the surge of the dam collapsing may have washed him downstream) a giant carp in the pool below the dam that three generations of my family have tried to catch. My Grandfather Weismiller ran trot lines, trying to catch it. He once 'borrowed' the weights off my Grandmother's grandfather clock to weigh down a trot line. The carp broke the trot line and Grandma's weights were lost. I don't think she ever forgave him! He'd been dead for 31 years when I was born, and almost every time I went fishing at the dam, she'd retell the story of her clock weights.

My Father and his brothers tried to catch the carp, and I and my friends tried for years. It has been hooked and seen, but it's always broken the line and escaped. I had always planned on taking my sons, and now grandsons, to the dam to continue the family tradition, but since we never lived in Marysville as a family, I never got round to it. Now, it's a plan that can never be carried out.

It's almost as if I've lost another childhood friend!

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