Daredevil Dan
I just finished shoveling a couple of inches of snow
out of the driveway. The plow had
already come through and by the time I finished much of the blacktop of the
road was showing through as the salt brine was working.
It wasn’t that way when I was young.
Snowplows hardly ever came down residential streets except for those
really big storms, and salt and sand were mostly used on only the main
roads. Something like this little
two-inch snowfall would have been simply packed down by the neighborhood
cars. That meant that the side streets
like Murphy Drive, where I grew up, were fairly slick most of the winter
months. In the daytime we used to play a
version of street hockey – on snow boots not skates. But after dark things got a little more daring
- for one winter anyway.
I was a quiet, well-behaved child growing up – the
youngest of nine. I was a good
student. I was quiet and shy. No one would have guessed that I was also the
champion bumper skier of Murphy Drive.
Bumper skiing was a nighttime sport that on our street
was born the night of a big snow storm.
A bunch of the neighborhood kids were out, armed with shovels. We weren’t looking for trouble. Quite the opposite; we were shoveling out
stuck cars. It started innocently
enough. We had dug out a car that had
become stuck near a corner. As we pushed
against the back bumper, the car crawled out of the snowbank and gained
traction. Instead of stopping like the
rest of the guys to watch the car pull away, I had the crazy notion to grab the
bumper, crouch down low so the drive couldn’t see me and hang on. I heard my buddies calling out from behind,
and stayed in a tucked position as the car gained speed.
It really wasn’t that big of a risk as there was another
stop sign just a block away. Sure
enough, the car slowed down and stopped.
I simply let go of the bumper and let the car pull away – kind of like
the separation of the Apollo rocket thruster from the command module. I turned to see the gang all running my way
and waving their arms in excitement.
“Weren’t you scared, Dan?” “Nope
– it was kinda fun!” I answered. I’m
pretty sure I sounded a bit like John Wayne, because I sure felt like John
Wayne. I had just invented bumper
skiing! Well, I take credit for
inventing it in my neighborhood. I admit
it was just the kind of questionable intelligence game that any boy of my era
might have thought of.
Over the course of the next few nights, we all took
turns – sometimes two or three of us at a time.
We stood on the corner, waited for a car to stop at the stop sign – we
quick ducked behind and grabbed the bumper.
All went well until one time as the car I was holding
on to pulled away from the stop sign, my right foot caught on something and I lost
my balance. For a brief moment I was
dragged by one arm as my mitten became caught in the bumper. I involuntarily let out a scared yell, but the driver
didn’t hear me. After half of a block, I
managed to pull free my hand free; the car, with my mitten still caught in the bumper, kept
going. I stood up and brushed myself
off. It occurred to us all then and there
that there were risks to bumper skiing that we maybe hadn’t thought through.
We lost our taste for bumper skiing after that. I considered myself lucky to not have been hurt, or worse yet, caught and yelled at by an adult. Or worse yet, caught by my dad. I still had to come up with some type of explanation of how I managed to lose my mitten.
At that point I
returned to my meek, mild-mannered life and gave up my brief fame as Daredevil
Dan. It’s a still a secret I haven’t
told to anyone. I don’t think anyone who knows me would believe it anyway.
His Peace <><
Deacon Dan
Comments
Post a Comment