Snow Crash

When I was 8, my dad got me the coolest present an 8-year-old could ever receive.  He bought me a four-wheeler!

To be fair, I'm fairly certain he bought it mostly for hunting purposes.  That was never a conflict for me, however, because my mom always had me when my dad would go to the Love Shack.

Yes.  He called the hunting cabin "The Love Shack."  It was an odd name for a huge shed filled with aggressively straight men and their beer farts.

Now then, my four-wheeler was amazing.  I could burn my legs on the exposed engine or even flip the entire vehicle on top of myself.  How could an 8 year old not love every moment of that? I never lost that zeal. Especially when I got to ramp it at my favorite spot: The Muddy Mountain.

To understand muddy mountain, we're going to have to go back.  Since the day I was born, my father has been building a two-story house with a loft and basement.  It could be beautiful. He even brought in these Amish hitchhikers to put in a stone and mortar fireplace.  Gorgeous.

Unfortunately, my father took several drinking breaks during construction.  After the siding went up, very little happened to the house. Eventually, the property tax policy changed and lines were redrawn. For these reasons, my father chose to stop construction entirely and leave the home unfinished and unlivable.

In the early phase of construction, though, they had to dig out a foundation.  Normally one would either haul off or repurpose the dirt. My family, however, let me play on it and fall in love with it.

I would climb it, throw clods, and roll down it.  My muddy mountain became so ingrained in my play fantasies that we named it.  As I grew, clearly, I got bored with it. But then, my father bought me, an 8-year-old, an ATV.

I mentioned flipping earlier.  Here's why: I put my life in peril so many times on that pile of dirt that my parents definitely should've had DCFS called on them.  But who would call? The parents who let their children wield guns? My friends had knives on their belts. They were 10! I STILL have no need for a belt knife.

That said, my muddy mountain was not the most dangerous aspect of my four-wheeler activities.  Picture snow. Everything was white (well, white-er). I took full advantage: rolling around, making snow angels, throwing snowballs at the trees that stood as proxy to friends since we lived in the middle of a corn field.  After the initial joy of playing in the snow wore off, however, my dad grew restless.

I’ve never claimed to understand the man, but I imagine he thought, “This kid seems to have a death wish...I can work with that.” Inspired by the lake activity called tubing, my dad tied a rope to the back of my four-wheeler and tied the other end of the rope to an inner tube.  At that point, he sat his youngest son on the tube and started the four-wheeler.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this, but I'm going to lay it all out for you.  At first, it was amazing! I held on tight and zipped across the snow. It was like super sledding.  I reached speeds only achievable in that time and place by putting yourself in danger of going into the lake.  My buddy Joe and I had several close calls seeking just such a thrill.

Eventually, though, the inevitable came, as it does.  At the peak of one of the pulls, my tube went directly into a super avoidable tree which I hit head-first.

This is the point where it’s actually fun to imagine my dad’s inner monologue: “Shit!  Now I’m going to have to pay for college!”

I don't remember it hurting.  I just remember being shaken and confused.  It's this day I always look back on when I wonder how my life would've turned out had I received a higher ACT score.

My dad reacted as dads, big brothers and other known fuck-ups tend to in these situations.  He rushed over, grabbed my shoulders and asked if I was okay. In retrospect, this would’ve been the perfect time to come out.  In reality, I was just so scared that we wouldn’t get to take another ride. As it turns out, after seeing his angelic, sweet boy T-bone an oak with his face, my father finally decided he was no longer willing to whip me across a snowy yard with your SUV.

As for me, I’d totally do it again.

Peanut-Peanut-Peanut Butter

I've never felt comfortable having one uniform set of silverware.  Sure, I'm barely an adult by my own standards. But let's be honest, plenty of people have their shit together by now.

x

Now, let me blame my family.  My father's house didn't just have two sets of mismatched spoons.  There were at least 5 different sets in the same drawer.

Why?

Peanut Butter.

Allow me to set the scene:   It's a 90+-degree day. The lake is like a tepid bath.  I've already almost died at least three times from jumping off the second story of my dad's boat dock.  I'm with every child within three years of my age and we all smell worse than you're probably imagining.

Parents didn't want us anywhere near their air-conditioned homes.  That was avoidable for a while. We had trampolines, electric mini-vehicles, 4-wheelers, slingshots, broken bottles, etc.  We had plenty of entertainment.

Unfortunately, children eventually get hungry.  Luckily, all of the country parents were oddly prescient when it came to our nutritional needs.  The moment I felt that first grumble, I'd see some adult coming out of one of the four homes with kids.  What would the adult have? Peanut butter in one hand and spoons in the other.

We'd  run, joyously to said adult, grab a spoon and dip into that jar.  All of the moisture would leave our mouths as we smacked our lips desperately trying to get the peanut butter from spoon to stomach.

Were the parents making sure our nutritional needs were being met? Sure.  Did that also shut us up for up to ten minutes? Absolutely!

What happened to the spoons, you ask?  Everything!

They would go into our pockets. They were tools, musical instruments and they served as a ticket to more peanut butter.  Therefore, they inevitably ended up wherever we did (home). Now, don't get me wrong. We certainly lost some of our original spoons this way as well.  Eventually, a statistician could tell you that there was a near-even distribution of spoons between all of our child-bearing neighbors.

This may sound like the same method people use to trick dogs into taking pills.  That’s fine. This particular “neighborhood” loved dogs as much if not more than people.  Being treated like a dog meant we were being treated like the most valued creatures around.

Now a tangent about the neighborhood dogs:

Every single neighbor (with the exception of the house that had 45 cats) had at least one dog.  They all ran around unhindered by kennels or chains. They often slept in the middle of the road that only four adults ever used.

When I was about four, my mom and I took our daily walk to the mailboxes (at the end of the road, but not the sexy Boyz 2 Men version).  On our way, Mama Buns’ dog, Shadow, was sleeping in the middle of the road. We passed him and nothing happened, but just wait.

On the way back, he was still there, but something felt off.  Maybe it was some type of intuition children have, then learn to doubt and suppress.  Maybe my own anxiety actually exacerbated the situation (but that feels so victim blame-y).  Regardless, I told my mom that I thought Shadow was going to bite me.

My mom looked down at the seemingly unconscious dog and told me I was being silly.  I resisted, she doubled-down, and so I tentatively started walking, giving Shadow a wide berth.  Moments later, I was knocked over. I really only remember black fur and pain. Shadow had lost his shit.

I next remember being lowered into a bath of ice water (like that kid from Secret Garden, I think).  I was cold, confused, and starting to form the foundations of a distrust of my mother’s reassurances that everything would be fine (or when she tried to tell me that I loved meatloaf which is the definition of slander).  It was a dark time.

I wasn’t given much time to actually voice any complaints, though, because before I even got a chance to consider getting out of the tub, I was handed the biggest spoonful of peanut butter I had ever seen.

If people question my steel spoons mixed in with my yellow gingham spoons, I probably won't tell them that all of my friends were given peanut butter instead of air conditioning, but know that that's what I mean when I look them in the eye and say, "I'm poor."