Gutter Dams on Summer Days

The Smell of Wet Concrete

The smell of water rushing down a gutter on a hot summer day swept me into nostalgia.

While staying at my dad‘s in La Mesa, CA over the summer after third grade, someone up the street did us the enormous favor of washing their car and leaving the hose running.

My brother and I became suburban beavers. It started with a paperboy-tossed copy of the Tribune from a neighbors lawn wedged against the curb. Then a rolled up Penny Saver. We added twigs and a scrap of 1x2 and whatever other junk we could find. Like a couple of megalomaniacal civil engineers, the bigger the lake got the bigger we wanted it to get, and we kept expanding the dam.

And that’s how we met Cliff, our neighbor. He came over to laugh at our effort, proclaiming himself the superior engineer of gutter dams. Of course, standing at the foot of our magnificent creation we scoffed at his claims. To prove his point, he went up the hill and tore down his much larger dam we didn’t know existed. We had only been holding back the overflow. With Cliff’s reservoir unleashed, the rushing water punched through our dam, tumbling our neighbors’ newspapers down West Manor Dr toward Severin. It turns out we were not Frank Crowe, but instead, William Mulholland.

And then we spent the next three summers hanging out with Cliff every chance we got.

We rode our Team Murray department store BMXers everywhere: to Northmont Park, where we could ride a piece of cardboard down the dewy grass hill, and to “The Swamp“ where we were certain we discovered oil, but it turned out to be a few million years too early for the rotted leaves, and of course, to Thrifty’s to get a double scoop ice cream cone—chocolate malted crunch and mint n chip—for a quarter.

That chapter ended when my dad moved before I started sixth grade. A time that had been a mountain peak in our lives became a rounded hill in the distance. A buried treasure chest whose key was the smell of wet concrete.

Last I heard, Cliff joined the army, possibly serving in Desert Storm.