The Tower of Death

Note: this is a requested post by my parents. I think they requested it for two reasons. 1. They like my story telling. 2. They like to remind me that no matter how awesome I think I am as a parent, they were at least as awesome. They were. 

Just before I turned four, my parents bought the old farmhouse that was my home until I moved out to go to college, and continues to be their home today.  It was on ten acres of land and had a big barn, a pig house, a huge chicken coop (it could handle 250 chickens), several fields for gardening, and the pond. Most people assume they fell in love with the old farmhouse. Some suspect that it was the barn and the outbuildings. The way my mom tells it, my dad wasn't convinced until he saw the pond and the fish that lived there, that sealed the deal. There are a lot of stories I could tell about the cows and the goats and the chickens and the geese and the pigs we had, and I might get into them some day, but today is about the pond.
My mom made it a priority to work from home when we were kids. She was a veterinarian and her office was in one end of the house. She kept pretty normal hours for a vet, with one notable exception. In the summer, she always took two hour lunches so that she could take us swimming in the pond before she fed us lunch. The pond was quite big for a farm pond and had a good supply of fish. It also had the crayfish, turtles, and dragonflies that populate any pond and gave us things to chase. Like most ponds in that part of the world it was a muck bottom pond. This problem was mostly solved with a dump truck load of good clean sand every 4 or 5 years on one corner of the pond. This gave us a "beach" to dig in and to build castles on. It also alleviated the muck problem in that one corner and made sure it was shallow enough for us to learn to swim, and we swam every day we could. We had a raft that floated on four 55 gallon drums that we would swim to and jump off of. We put in a dock and picked up a second hand diving board when the neighbors filled in their pool. We had a collection of old boats and learned to row and paddle and sail to the extent that the pond would let us. The most interesting thing we had on the pond though, had to be the Tower of Death.
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Now, I'm not sure if my dad built the tower because he got a hold of three old telephone poles, or if he figured out how to get the poles because he wanted to build the tower, it probably doesn't matter. The end result is that my dad decided at some point, that it was a good idea to build a high diving platform at the edge of our pond. This was both brilliant and idiotic. Brilliant because it provided us with the most incredible swimming toy ever, idiotic because we all decided that high is never high enough.

In most farm ponds you're pretty limited with the diving you can do. Unless you build a dock you can't really dive off shore because it's too shallow. Docks are only so high, and even with the diving board on the end, it's not terribly exciting. A few years before, we had built a wall around two edges of the pond. This kept the dirt back and created a section where the water was about 4 feet deep immediately out from shore and perhaps 6 feet deep a little farther out. This was much more like a pool than a pond and we liked to dive off of the ground from there. Farm kids pretending they had a pool, it was great. Kids being kids, we were always saying that we wished we had a rope swing or a zip line or something awesome to launch us into the water. We thought we might be on to something when my dad mentioned that he had gotten three phone poles, but we didn't know quite what.
The poles were big, especially to my 12 year old self that summer, and I couldn't believe that we were going to have something that tall on the edge of the pond. They sort of freaked out my mom too and she was not happy about the idea. My dad assured her that we were only building a low platform and the poles were only that tall because that's just how tall they were. We weren't crazy enough to build something that tall. We dug two holes right at the side of the pond about 4 feet deep and a third one farther back. We hoisted the poles into place, added some cement and waited a few days. Then we had to decide how tall to make the platform. We all decided that somewhere around 8 feet was perfect. We were already about one foot above water level at the bank, and nine feet is pretty high, especially when you have little kids. We then set out to build the platform. It wasn't too bad, three boards and decking, and we had it nailed together in short time. We spent one glorious week jumping off of the platform, feet first, cannon balls, and dives for those of us who knew how to dive and could convince my mom that we weren't going to break our necks on the bottom. During that week we came to call our new toy the Diving Platform. It was all very civilized. It was also nearly perfect, with only one problem. The platform was 8 feet high, but we had another 10 or so feet of phone pole sticking up above us. My mom thought we should just leave them alone or possibly cut them off. All of the kids, and my dad, thought that a much more reasonable solution was to build another, higher, platform. That's what we did. 
To build the first platform we used ladders on the ground. For the second platform we were another 8 feet higher in the air and we didn't have a ladder that high. We ended up using a ladder on the first platform to get the height we needed for the second platform. Shockingly, we didn't die, not that we didn't come close. Getting the three support boards in place was tricky, but doable. Getting the decking in place required climbing up on top of the support boards and pounding in nails while balanced 16 feet above the ground. It doesn't sound that bad, but I was the one who was volunteered to do it, and I was sitting on a 2x6 two stories high and it felt pretty bad. While I was up there gingerly hammering in the first nails, I managed to squeak out the observation that this wasn't a diving tower, it was a tower of death. My fear induced comedy met with an enthusiastic response. We had built the Tower of Death.
All through Jr. high and high school the Tower of Death provided entertainment. We continued to dive off of the lower platform, but due to the depth of the water diving from the top was banned. More than a few big strong teenage boys standing on the ground claimed that they were going to be the first to do it, but standing 17 feet above the water they all changed their minds. In fact, a few of them had to back off from the top without even jumping in feet first, 17 feet is a long way down. My friends would go home and tell their parents about jumping off the Tower of Death, and my parents had to answer a few concerned phone calls. My mom tried to convince us to call it something else, but the name stuck and even our neighbors knew what the tall diving tower visible from the main road was called. The Tower of Death was one awesome thing that I could point to in my youth. Other guys had a pool, or a cool car, or a dirt bike, I had the Tower of Death, and I loved it.
Eventually I moved away, and then all of us kids moved away. At about that time, a developer bought the 120 acres of corn fields that wrapped around two sides of my parents property and started building houses. The fence rows and woods where I'd hunted rabbits and deer, and the corn fields that we'd played tag in became soulless tract homes. Those homes filled up with families and those families had children. Just as I found the woods and the pond behind my parents house irresistible in my youth, so did they. To compound the issue, all of the extra woods that I had explored were gone, converted to houses, so all of the wild jungle that was left anywhere was my parents property. The kids came, they played, they climbed up the Tower of Death, and they were kicked off by my parents. A sign was posted telling them that it was dangerous and that they should stay off. This only made things more attractive to them and they kept coming back. Finally, someone who wasn't supposed to be there and had been warned to stay away, fell and broke their leg. It could have been worse. He could have been hurt worse and he could have had a parent who took it worse. His dad came over to talk to my parents and told them what had happened and that his son had been told to stay off it. He placed all of the blame securely on his son but mentioned that tearing the built in ladder off of the tower might help to keep the kids off. He was pretty sure his son was done climbing up, but the neighborhood was still full of boys.
That's what my dad did, he went out with a heavy heart and he tore the ladder off. Even though we're grown and gone, my kids, and my nieces and nephews still look longingly at the Tower of Death. It's still there, against the better judgment of my mom and the insurance company. Still visible from the road and the neighborhood next door. It's a reminder of a different time, and of adventures we had a long time ago. It's also waiting. Waiting for my kids to learn to swim well enough that we can head back to Grandpa's pond and live the stories that they've heard me tell. Waiting to lean a new ladder up against the poles so that they can climb up and jump off. Waiting, so that I can feel the terror that my mom felt as she watched us plunge into the water.
Jumping off the Tower of Death.