We didn’t take things too seriously and we stopped to have fun when and where fun and excitement came before us. Sometimes we just needed to be a bit creative. If you were a young male or female teen in our town, chances are you had the experience of flying “The Hill”. The Hill was a dream road gifted by the gods and goddesses who created rolling hills and traffic engineers who created roads that would provide a ride more heart-stopping than any carnival barker could provide.
The Hill was a straight shot that was four-point eight miles long, rarely driven, and well maintained. Why? We weren’t sure and didn’t care but we would drive the slightly inclining road which led us to the beginning of the thrill called “The Hill” and make a right turn and step on it. The first quarter miles were almost flat and then there was a wonderful twenty-five-degree decline that went for several hundred yards and then back up another twenty-five-degree incline and as quickly as your stomach hit the bottom of your torso came to another sudden twenty-five-degree decline. And there were three in a row. It was easy to hit fifty to sixty miles an hour in the first quarter-mile with some of the quicker cars we’d drive, but even with Mom and Dad’s cruiser, it wasn’t the speed of the first quarter-mile. It was the launch at the top of the first incline! The road was straight the ride was exhilarating and the sparks did fly when these almost two-ton metal behemoths would bottom out and begin the descent on the next downward trajectory… Seat belts? Seat belts! Why would you want to wear seat belts and miss one of the most exciting parts of the ride as when the car bounced off the blacktop road inertia – got love physics at this point – tossed its riders in the like being shot out of a toaster and being tapped on the head by the ceiling of the car. If by some way and somehow you could have pulled and pried the seat belts out from the crease between the seat and seat back you surely would have been laughed at, scoffed, and banned forevermore from The Hill. And a ban like that can last through generations! The beauty of this design from the gods, goddesses, and engineers was to provide for us plenty of room to slow down, make the stop, and then the casual right-hand turn to and take the drive back into town – or back to another gut-wrenching, thrill-seeking ride on… The Hill (echo, echo, echo.)
On another weekend evening, my brother and I were making our way back home after a forty-mile road trip to the nearest big city. For us, big cities were anything over ten thousand people. We hadn’t been out for ages and decided we would go out and play some pool have some drinks and hit it hard on the farm the next day. I happened to have run into a friend of ours earlier in the day who had secured a bit of bud and although we were not stoner folks, we thought it would be fun to take a couple of joint hits before we went into the bar. We hit the joint. We probably hit that bud more than just a couple of times as we played pool and drank beer for several hours… Now the final six to eight miles from the big city to our house was over some pretty impressive bluffs.
We knew the roads along the bluffs well nevertheless, the drive called for a bit of focus on the part of the driver. I was driving and had done fine negotiating my way up the bluff and across the top of the bluff but as I got about a third of the way down the opposite side of the bluff, just a few miles from our house, a county cop decided I was taking up too much space on both sides of the two-lane road. To be clear, I had no business driving but was not so inebriated that I couldn’t make my way home, as long as an animal did not run in front of my car or someone else in my condition did not come from the opposite direction. The squad pulled up behind us. I looked at my brother leaning up against the passenger door. He was smaller than I and had drank a few more beers than I. “Just be cool. I am all right.” I said. “Oki Doki” he responded. The office was very nice. He asked for my license and registration and then went back to the cruiser while we sat there waiting. I think the police do that on purpose. Make us all sit there and wait. They probably are telling each other jokes or finishing a game of solitaire on their cell phones, just to make us sit in our cars and sweat a little bit and let our imaginations run wild. Folks all over the country are sitting in cars having illusions they will be found with a brick of cocaine in the trunk – even though they wouldn’t even know what a brick of cocaine looks like. Then they would be sent up the river and end up along the river on a chain gang splitting rocks next to a guy named Billy Bob who had an accent as bizarre as those white glove-wearing, tea-drinking British women with the big-brimmed hats.
After what seemed hours, the patrolman walked back up to my door. “I don’t know if you are aware of this but I know your parents and I would hate to have to knock on their door at two o’clock in the morning to tell them we found you guys pinned against a tree on the side of this hill…” I nodded, trying to figure out if I knew this guy. I didn’t. “Yeah, I understand, I get it. We don’t have far to go.” “No, you don’t.” He responded. At this point, I began breathing a bit easier, but within the next few seconds, I felt like I was having a stroke. My brother decided it would be best if leaned over and announced to the patrolman “Well if you had gotten a buzz and then drank as much as he has you probably couldn’t even drive as good as he is driving. He got us this far officer. He’s a good driver officer…” Gulp.
Times being what they were, where we were the officer just shook his head and said “Tell you what, how about you let your brother drive the rest of the way home and just take it easy. I’m going to follow you home and if you go over the middle of the road, you’re going to walk home. Goodnight, guys.” “What! What the hell!” I was hoping that I had said that internally and had not hollered those words out. The guy was snockered! I jumped out of the car and around to the passenger side and my brother moved over into the driver’s seat, put the car in drive, and proceeded down the road… “Keep your tongue in the middle of your mouth and don’t go across the imaginary yellow line dude.” We didn’t have yellow lines on the country roads, and police literally would just take your keys and make you walk home instead of all this arresting and losing licenses and being suspended and taking classes to be allowed back behind the wheel. Really! It was often that way.
After a short distance of following us, the cruiser sped on by. The second the cruiser’s tail lights disappeared my brother pulled over. “Holy shit, did I do that? You need to drive bro. I am waaay too drunk to drive.” And from there we proceeded home with me back at the wheel.
The saying goes “Work hard and party hard.” There was a lot of that Although our parents were aware their children were nearing the doors of adulthood, they still maintained watchful eyes. Having entered into and having spent years walking around in adulthood themselves, they knew these ages of 16 to 24 could become treacherous and firm guidance was required. When I bought my first car my father agreed to co-sign with one caveat. “You need to be home to work at chore time and on the weekends.” My mom fretted a bit more. I would be faithful to that agreement and he would be sure to be there if I did need any guidance along the way.
I did need that guidance and it went like this.
One Friday night I called my buddy Belly and we decided to go to the basketball game. The team was at home so we would get something to drink and go to the game. This would be our first venture into hard liquor. We felt we had mastered beer although there were a couple of times the beer had mastered us, like the time my mother knocked on my car window after finding me sleeping in the car in the middle of the yard – but that’s another story for another time.
We were probably getting close to our seventeenth birthdays. Getting booze was not a challenge back then. If one had the money to buy it and was old enough to take off the counter or bar they could probably have it. Times were just different then. Belly would get their four-wheel-drive so we could do a bit of off-roading after the game. Being drinking novices we had no idea what we liked. We had not developed a taste for anything in particular but somehow, we landed on getting a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Yeah.
And so let the adventure begin and we had a great time. Well, we had a great time for a few hours, but it was the hours after the first few that were most memorable, or perhaps most enjoyable, even though we couldn’t quite put all the pieces together in our minds, we came to agree we’d enjoyed the night. We laughed on recalling we’d called out one of our teachers by their first name. He was an official for the game, and he’d looked up at us with a rather stern look which quieted us. After the game, we continued to finish the Schnapps, hang out a bit, got some junk food, and headed out towards our farms and we went four-wheeling through freshly harvested corn fields. We had a blast.
Belly dropped me off in the front yard without turning off his vehicle and he proceeded the two-mile trek to their farm. I managed to make my way down to the house, and cut a nice big piece of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, and pour a glass of rich, filled with vitamin D whole milk, scooped fresh from the bulk milk tank in the milk house, just hours earlier. My mom came out with her bath rope around her and sat with me at the kitchen table for a minute. I was afraid she could tell I had a buzz, but she said nothing of it. I soon made my way upstairs to my bedroom. I laid down in a bed that kept spinning. I finally was able to get to sleep but the sun came up way too soon that Saturday morning.
Being a young man of my word and not wanting to disappoint my dad, or risk losing car privileges, I was at the breakfast table ready to go to work. My dad looked across the table and became aware I had been out partying last night. He could certainly see it and could probably smell it as well. He smiled a bit and then informed me “It is probably a good day to get the chicken coop cleaned out. Why don’t you start on that this morning…” Some of you may understand what the old man just did but for those of you who are not quite clear let me explain.
Chicken manure has a high ammonia smell and the way I needed clean the chicken coop was to get a metal bucket – about the side of a laundry basket – and then while using a pulling tool similar to a tool used to pull snow off a roof, I would have to pull the chicken manure, more commonly referred to as chicken shit, into the bucket, carry the bucket over to the manure spreader and then dump the bucket into the manure spreader. Many, many, many times. After the first half-hour, I had the dry heaves. My mouth could not feel the water I was pouring into it. “Damn, dude.” Realizing how dumb I had been the night before. After about an hour of this and when about halfway done with the task my dad came walking over to the chicken coop. He had a smirk on his face. “How is it going then?” I know he wanted to just laugh out loud. “I’ll be done by noon.” He shook his head, turned, and walked away. “You can go to the feed mill this afternoon.” He had given me a chore reprieve. Going to the feed mill was a kind of lax chore. I would have to fill up the pick-up with corn but once at the mill, I could just sit and wait for the corn to be ground up into feed for the cows. I took a much-needed nap.
And to this day I cannot be around the smell of peppermint schnapps.
