My fellow blogger, William Boucher (Brighton hub), suggests that I "roll with my Huck Finn heritage". But it's hard to roll very far with that, as only a smattering of my childhood days were spent doing anything Huck Finn-ish. Nor did I have a Tom Sawyer, or, alas, a Becky Thatcher either.
No, most of my childhood consisted of going to school, doing chores, avoiding chores, reading books, and falling out of the occasional treehouse. Not that I didn't dream of having such adventures; Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were among my favorite books. I'd read them over and over again, and bemoan the lack of any caves other than sandstone slot caves in the neighboorhood along with our dearth of navigatible rivers. True, I built many a raft - some of them even floated - but had to be content with paddling them around the pond. Deer Creek has an annual average depth of about three inches. Those times when it does have enough water in it to carry you away somewhere, it is a frightening raging torrent. If the sight of churning muddy water racing by at 30 mph doesn't bring you to your senses, the sound of the bolders grinding along on the creek bottom sure will. It was enough to even scare my brother Dirk the daredevil out of trying it, which is really saying something considering a lot of the things he
did try.
It was Dirk that invented the sport of riding the wagon down the neighbors' driveway, for instance - our version of bobsledding. Now that may not sound like much of a daredevil sport; however, it did have an element of death defiance to it. You see, the neighbors' driveway is rather long and so steep it requires 4WD even in the summer. Once you started down the hill, stopping was problematic. And of course there was the road at the base of the hill to consider, along with our chain link fence on the other side.
The idea was, you'd listen very carefully for any cars coming down the road, launch yourself down the hill, and then try to make the bend onto the road so you could continue all the way down to the park. Most of these attempts ended with us either dumping the wagon and rolling across the road like a rag doll in a cloths dryer, or crashing into the fence with such force that boy and wagon bounced back to land in a heap in the middle of the road. Sometimes we had to dump the wagon intentionally when an unheard car would suddenly come into view. Never did broadside any, but we did cause a few people to perform unanticipated break tests...
Dirk was a fine one for getting me to do all sorts of things I ordinarily would have had the good sense not to do. I'd consider the possible consequences of the proposed action if something went wrong, such as jumping a four-foot gap in a ledge some 100 feet up the side of a sheer cliff, consider Dirk's, um, "persuasive talents", and usually conclude that "well, it couldn't hurt as much as Dirk". I figure my most amazing accomplishment of childhood to be my accidental survival.
About the picture: That's my silly little girl Spirit sitting in the fridge. All my cats are fascinated by the refrigerator - I've had as many as four of them climbing around in there at once - but Spirit is downright obsessed over it. And if it keeps getting so damn hot this summer, I may just start climbing in there with her!