Growing Up on High Point Drive

Growing up on High Point Drive in the 1960s, the world was as big as your imagination and as small as the dead-end street you played on. I was just a young kid back then, the kind who took the words of my elders as absolute, gospel truth. And at the top of our hill, ruling over the skyline like two metal and concrete giants, sat the neighborhood water tanks.

One was a tall, silver cylinder perched high on spider-like steel stilts. The other was a squat, solid concrete tank sitting flat and heavy right on the red dirt.

To a kid, they were just fascinating, slightly imposing fixtures of the landscape. But to my grandmother—my father’s mother—they were the perfect tools for a little bit of psychological warfare.

One afternoon, looking up the hill, she laid out the grand design of municipal engineering for me with a completely straight face.

“Now look up there,” she’d say, pointing a finger toward the crest of High Point. “That tall tank up on the stilts? That’s where the city keeps the cold water. And that concrete one sitting flat on the ground? That’s for the hot water.”

It made perfect, unassailable sense to a seven-year-old. You want a cold glass of water? It comes from the sky tank. Time for a bath? They pump it out of the ground tank. I went around for years completely secure in the knowledge that our plumbing was divided by local landmarks.

But my grandmother didn’t stop at simple civil engineering lessons. She had a healthy dose of that sharp, teasing bite that runs straight through our family line—a streak I’ll gladly admit I inherited honest and still carry with me today.

Once she had me hook, line, and sinker on the hot and cold routine, she delivered the kicker.

“The real trouble,” she’d warn, looking down at me with that knowing glint in her eye, “is if either one of ’em ever springs a leak. If they do, all that water is coming roaring straight down this hill, and it’s going to flood us right out of house and home.”

For a long time after that, every thunderstorm or loud rumble from the top of the ridge had me eyeing the hill, wondering if a tidal wave of municipal hot water was about to wash away my childhood.

She was a great grandmother in a lot of ways, but she definitely had a little bit of a mean-stick about her. Looking back, I can’t help but laugh. It was a different time, where love was often served with a side of harmless terror, and a grandmother’s favorite pastime was seeing just how much yarn she could spin before her grandkid caught on.