EAGLE PASS AND HESS, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY


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Lo siguiente es de...The following is from...
Gone Are the Days/Se han ido los días

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    En la foto de arriba donde dábamos vuelta a la izquierda en la calle Hess Lane, había una clase de zanja y una alcantarilla de cemento. Era de unos seis o siete pies de profundidad. Se podía sentar en el cemento de la parte de arriba y muchos jóvenes lo hacían a menudo.
    Un día, mientras yo estaba sentado allí mirando las piedras en el fondo de la alcantarilla de abajo, de súbito perdí el equilibrio y me empecé a caer. Yo podría ver las piedras duras y puntiagudas donde iba a aterrizar de bruces. No podía hacer nada contra esto; el desastre era inminente.
De repente sentí que alguien me había cogido el cogote y luego me incorporó en el cemento exactamente donde estaba antes. Era un Patrol Boy que estaba sentado a mi lado. Él se había dado cuenta de lo que me estaba pasando y sin titubear estiró la mano para agarrar y salvarme.
     Sesenta y dos años han pasado y no queda mucho de la zanja ni de la alcantarilla en la esquina de Eagle Pass y Hess. Lo que veo con Google Earth me parece mucho más pequeño de lo que me acuerdo aunque, por supuesto, yo era mucho más pequeño también en aquel entonces. Se ve todavía un poquito de cemento, pero la zanja ha sido cubierta de tierra y hay una tapa de alcantarilla encima.

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     Yo siempre he sido coleccionista de fósiles y cuando tenía cinco o seis años yo estaba en la zanja en la esquina con dos piedras llenas de crinoideos cuando un muchacho me las quitó y me dijo:
    —¡Vas a usarlas para luchar contra alguien!
    Podía ver que era alguna clase de demente que nunca había conocido antes. Más tarde me enteré de que tales dementes se llamaban matones. Desde entonces siempre me han fascinado estos chiflados asquerosos.
     Yo salí de la zanja sonriendo un poquito porque yo había ocultado fósiles debajo del asiento de mi bicicleta y el matón no lo sabía.

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    In the photo above, where we turned left on Hess Lane on the way to school, there was a kind of ditch and cement storm sewer. It was about six or seven feet deep. You could sit on the cement at the top and many young people often did so.
    One day, while I was sitting there looking at the stones at the bottom of the ditch below, I suddenly lost my balance and began to fall. I could see the hard, pointed stones where I was going to land face first. There was nothing I could do about it; disaster loomed.
Suddenly I felt someone grab me by the scruff of my neck and then set me back upright onto the cement exactly where I was before. It was the Patrol Boy who was sitting next to me. He had realized what was happening to me and without hesitation reached out to grab and save me.
     Sixty-two years have gone by and there is not much left of the ditch and storm sewer at the corner of Eagle Pass and Hess. The picture I see on Google Earth seems an awful lot smaller than what I remember, but of course I was an awful lot smaller back then too.
   You still see a little bit of cement, but the ditch has been covered with dirt and there is a manhole cover on top.

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    I've always been a fossil collector and when I was five or six years old, I was in the ditch on the corner with two stones full of crinoids when a boy took them from me and said, "You're going to use them to fight someone!"
     I could see that he was some kind of a loon  that I had never met before. I later learned that such disturbed people were called bullies. Since then I have always been fascinated by these odious lunatics.
     I left the ditch smiling a little because I had hidden fossils under the seat of my bicycle that the bully didn't know about.

SECOND RETURN 2000 PISS POT VISTA—THE CULVERT—SONNY CATCHES CRAPPIES AND A ROCK BASS—THE TEN-FOOT LOG— CIVIL RIGHTS WORKERS

   There were other sights on my list that I wanted to see. One was Peace Pipe Vista, a gorgeous overlook of Lake Itasca surrounded by tall white pines. I made the mistake of calling it "Piss Pot Vista," a term that Sonny would repeat every two minutes for the remainder of the trip. We also had to visit the culvert, a pipe through which the entire Mississippi flowed into a beautiful, fishy pool at the end of which the river continued lazily onward until it turned out of sight to continue through places unknown and mysterious to me. We went down to the pool and Sonny hooked and landed two black crappies and a strapping red-eyed rock bass. I caught a pike. I always felt that this was the perfect fishing pool as it was possible to catch anything —anything at all—in it. Upstream are the headwaters of the Mississippi.

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