Woods & Water by Dick Herfindahl

Another week has passed us by and there are still threats of snow and below average temperatures lurking in the shadows. As I try to keep my thoughts on a positive note, I am looking back at some of the funny things that happened in summers that have passed.

As a kid I grew up in the country, but was in all reality, fairly close to town. I went to Hammer School in grades one through six and I have no regrets about going to what was considered a country school.

As kids, we would run barefoot in the summer, drink from a garden hose and catch frogs, baby turtles, grasshoppers and any other unfortunate creature that happened to wander into our world. We eventually figured out that there are just some wild critters that cannot be domesticated.

There was one time that sticks out in my mind when a friend of my dad’s gave me a white rat and the cage that he kept it in. My mother, being raised on a farm, was less than pleased at having a rat of any color living in the same house as her. One fateful day I had opened the cage to feed my little buddy when he made the great escape. Once my mom found out she started freaking out because now she had a rat running free in her house.

Lucky for me we located Whitey about an hour later, but it was not so lucky for the rat because she made me get rid of it. None of my friends were brave enough to take it off of my hands for fear of repercussions, so my dad said he would find someone to take it. I never did hear who or if anyone actually took the rat because my dad just said that he had found a home for it and I didn’t pursue any details.

In those days, the adults that raced stock cars at the fairgrounds and the kids that raced soap box derby cars were kind of like our heroes and a lot of us kids would build our own version of race cars. There was actually one kid who had a genuine derby car. In a way I was kind of envious of him, but that didn’t deter me from building my own race car.

I was able to come up with some old axles and wheels off of a couple of old wagons that I found in the dump, which was actually right across the road from our house on Bridge Avenue at the time. My dad had given me a jar full of various bolts and nuts and a coffee can full of bent nails that he had salvaged when they remodeled the house. That was the only hardware that I had to use in building my racing machine. Over the years I built and rebuilt that old cart more times than I can remember. 

I spent hours in the garage cutting boards, drilling holes with an old hand drill and finally nailing and bolting my masterpiece together. My initial run was over at my friend Kim Dillings house, which was across the road from our house. As I made my initial run down the hill, I realized that I hadn’t fine-tuned the steering and I ran smack dab into a big old oak tree. I ended up breaking the front end off of my racing machine, so I headed back across the road with pieces in hand to spend more time in the garage pounding, drilling and sawing.

Now my steering mechanism was a 2×4 board with a wheel and axle attached to each end, which was then bolted to a 2×12 board. You had one foot on each side to steer and if all went well it worked great, but any little obstacle would cause it to take a sharp turn and you could smash the tendon on the back of your ankle.

I learned to live with the aches and pains along with the numerous bruises. Even though building a good racing machine was really an exercise in futility, I was doing something that I enjoyed and entertaining myself, which is how it really was in those days.

In today’s society it is all about structure; organized baseball, football, hockey, and much more. Kids need time to be kids and to use their imaginations to entertain themselves. When is the last time you have seen a bunch of kids at a park just playing a pickup baseball game? There are three kids that live just around the corner from my house and they don’t live on a busy street, so quite often they are out in the street just kicking and throwing a football. Whenever I see them I think to myself, this is what kids should be doing more of. Whenever we have a family get-together at our house, my sons and grandsons will go outside after the meal and throw the football around in the street in front of the house. This is just how they were raised. They would rather be in the game than be watching the game.

Please take some time to honor those who have sacrificed so for the freedoms we enjoy today. Also, take some time to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice, those who served and those troops serving today.