Rambling on About Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th is supposed to be unlucky. Many skyscrapers have no 13th floor: and none of the buildings in downtown Loonfoot Falls have a 13th floor.

It's not that we're particularly superstitious. There aren't any buildings downtown with more than four floors.

There's even a 13th Avenue South on some old maps, south of the Grimm County Fairground. It doesn't actually exist: although there's still a stub at the end of Fairside Road, going about fifteen feet toward where South 13th would have been.

The street was part of the proposed Southside Addition: a residential zone between the fairground and the Interstate, along the Loonfoot River. Plans for the addition were going smoothly until the 1965 flood.

The Loonfoot River rose almost to the deck of the 12th Street bridge: and entirely covered what would have been the Southside Addition. The Southside Addition was on the council's agenda a week after the food's peak, rejected, and never brought up again.

I don't know that flood was "unlucky," though: if it had happened a couple years later, a lot of people would have lost their homes.

Then there's the Belvedere Union Grand's room 313. Haunted, maybe: unlucky? I'd say not.

There was that fateful Friday the 13th in 1908, when the Bijou Opera House burned down. Indirectly as a result of an anti-superstition club meeting. I've written about that before.

What's the point of all this? I'm obliged to provide 250 words for this column each week. Now I have.

Labor Day, the Landfill, and Bearclaw Pond

About a dozen kids petitioned City Hall to leave the landfill open over the Labor Day weekend. Or at least unlocked.

I sympathize with them. I used to go fishing in Bearclaw Pond myself.

That was before people built houses on the track between Bearclaw Pond and Durbin's Pond, and re-named it Waterview Lane. Then one of the Baums built a place on west 9th, overlooking Hinkley Creek. Within a few years they had neighbors, all the way to Center Avenue.

That left Bearclaw Pond blocked in by lawns, Fisk Implement, and the landfill.

Fisk Implement has a sturdy fence, and a touchy alarm system, ever since someone towed a harrow away, back in 1996.

The people living around Bearclaw Pond don't particularly like kids trooping across their lawns.

Last year, Loonfoot Falls put a fence around the landfill, and started enforcing the rule about staying out unless you worked there, or were dumping something.

The kids didn't like that. As young fisherman Alex Johnson said, "it's like they don't want anybody in there." Alex doesn't see why the landfill should be off limits. "We don't mess around, much," he explained.

City Hall says that they don't have a choice. The city's insurance company has rules about access to places like landfills.

Alex says he understands City Hall's position, but won't give up.

"Maybe we can make a path along the side of the landfill, or get one of those people to let us cross their yard," he told me.