Ignorance creates a flooded bliss

It’s hard to believe after the June we’ve had, but there was a time I thought floods were fun.
That was back before I ever had to worry about things like sump pumps, before Federal Flood Insurance had even been invented, before I’d ever given a thought to crop losses.
In other words, back when I was a kid.
Ignorance, the old saying goes, is bliss. Maybe that’s why childhood can be so happy; if you don’t have a clue what’s really going on, everything seems like more fun.
And, back in the day, a good summer flood could be fun.
There were puddles to splash in. Mud was plentiful. And in our neighborhood, the street usually flooded up over the curbs, making a temporary — if not very attractive — waterpark.
Two memorable floods occurred when I was a kid: One in 1957 and one in 1958. And I think the ’57 flood was the worse of the two. It claimed the life of a farmer east of Portland who had gone out to try to secure his herd of cows in the face of rising water, and the seriousness of that hit home even for kids.
But mostly those floods — even the fatal one in ’57 — seemed like fun to an 8-year-old. (I would turn 9 the following November, but I wouldn’t suddenly be any smarter or insightful than I was at 8.)
West North Street in those days didn’t even have curbs. It was paved more or less like a county road and had a hump in the middle, tapering off on each side toward the adjacent properties.
Down by my buddy Dan’s house, there was a catch basin, a large one, that was near the trunk of a tree. Because of the hump of the road and maybe because of the tree, the catch basin was significantly lower than the pavement.
The net result: A deep spot, a puddle-sized pool, and a magnet for every kid in the neighborhood.
For hours over the first few days after the street flooded, we would splash and frolic in that spot.
Was it safe? Absolutely not.
The neighborhood was mostly served by a combined sewer system. When you flushed a toilet, it went into the same system as the stormwater runoff. And after the deluge that caused the flood, nearby homeowners couldn’t flush their toilets at all because the whole system was overloaded.
Was it a chance to contract cholera or dysentery? You bet it was.
And any kid splashing in that deep spot who happened to have an open wound — that would be all of us when you counted the scraped knees and elbows — was asking for trouble.
Then there was the raft. My parents had remodeled the porch at our house a few years before, and there were wooden columns left behind in the garage. They were mostly of use as props at a Latin class Roman banquet. But they also looked enough like logs or pontoons that my older brothers and his buddies decided to build a raft.
They launched it in the flooded yard a few doors away, the same yard next door to my current house which has flooded a couple of times already this summer. It floated, but it was not stable enough to hold any of the guys who had built it.
So they drafted a test sailor who was small enough: Me.
The voyage was a short one and ended with me jumping into water nearly up to my waist and hauling the raft back to higher ground.
But somehow, none of us got sick.
Maybe ignorance is not only bliss. Maybe — at least when we’re younger — it can act as some sort of antibiotic.