The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

Surviving Childhood

This afternoon, an office conversation took place between a co-worker and me that ended up being more or less a couple of 40-somethings reminiscing about things we did in our youth that we probably shouldn't have lived through.¹

It has been said that fortune favors the prepared, but she also apparently has a soft spot for stupid teen-age boys.

In the spirit of the earlier conversation, I present you with the following tale from my youth:

There were about a dozen boys in my  neighborhood within a couple of years of each other in age, between around 11 and 13.  There was very little through-traffic in my neighborhood, so riding one's bike in the street really wasn't an issue.  There was a small forest at one end of the neighborhood in which older kids with dirt-bikes had made paths, and we spent a fair amount of time riding around back there.  Most of us had BMX bikes by this time (mine was very much like this one, but orange.  And with wheels), which, of course, made us nearly invincible.²

Towards the back of the woods was a wash-out that drained into the runoff creek.  The washout was about two miles wide and at least a thousand feet deep 12 feet across and maybe 8 feet deep (it's actually still there, amazingly, and hasn't been developed into a subdivision...), and after months of being content to ride our bikes through the wash-out, we came up with the totally brilliant idea of setting up a ramp and jumping over the gap.  We envisioned something like this:

Look At Me! I Can Fly!

The reality was rather different:

That's Gonna Leave A Mark...

See, what did us in was physics.  It never occurred to any of us that there was no freakin' way any of us were going to be able to get up enough speed pedaling a bicycle for 40 feet to jump off a foot-tall ramp made of a piece of plywood and a cinder block and have any hope of doing anything more impressive than verifying that gravity still worked a third of the way across the gully.

The saddest part is that each of us had to prove that for ourselves.

The only thing that would have made it worse is if there had been girls there, since by then we were all hitting that part of a teen-age boy's life where our main goal in life was proving to teen-age girls that we weren't all rock-stupid idiots.  (Ironic, isn't it, that the sort of things we did to prove that we weren't rock-stupid idiots are precisely the same things that are likely to have removed any doubt about the matter...)  For illustrative purposes, this is what teen-age boys in 1980 wanted girls to see them as:

One Of The Original Movie Bad-asses

The reality was probably more like this:

Eventually, we figured out that impressing the girls was much more effective if we actually survived to benefit from the results.

-Jay

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¹I should acknowledge the patience of my other co-worker who patiently endured all of this with little more than an occasional eye-roll and head-shake. I see that look a lot from her, actually. She knows me well.

²Nearly invincible is teen-age boy for not very good at thinking things through.

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