Month: October 2005

The story of my father’s death has always ended with the actual death, followed by my feeling responsible for it. Mostly because that was how it happened. Now I am going to talk about what happened after that, the names will not be changed, no one was innocent.

If there is one thing that I learned from my father’s death (aside from the obvious; a sick person is not the best judge of how sick they are) it is certainly that you only know who your friends are when you die. To be a bit more specific, you don’t know what your friends are really like until you die. Of course you are already dead at that point so it is not like you can really make any changes to your friends list. So I was the one that got to see just what kind of friends dad really had.

The day after his death (you know, Christmas day) people were already calling and showing up at the house saying things like, “he told me that if he died he wanted me to have “x”. I didn’t let anyone take anything, I was still holding out hope that he had a will stashed away somewhere. As the coming weeks would show, no such document existed. Events that would soon transpire would make that a moot point anyway.

The most pressing issue at this point was what was going to happen to me (I thought it was the most pressing issue anyway). I had been dating a girl for years, we had plans to get married. We really didn’t understand that we were as young as we were, and couldn’t understand why everyone wanted me to move out of the county to live with dad’s relatives, or out of the state to live with my mom. I wanted to be emancipated, since I was 16 it should have been possible. I don’t remember exactly why that couldn’t work, it might have been opposition from my mother or possibly the Social Security payments wouldn’t come to me if I was emancipated. I don’t know. What I did know was that I was not going to move away. I had been dating this girl for like three years, which may not seem all that long but at the time it was almost 20% of my life.

That was when I made the second worst decision of my entire life (the first being that I didn’t take dad directly to the hospital. And the third came only two years later. Glad I got those horrible life changing mistakes taken care of at a young age.), I agreed to let my oldest brother become my legal guardian. This would allow me to finish my High School years in Oregon, with basically no adult supervision. My brother was four years older than me, but he was not an authorative figure. He told me to jump, I told him to go fuck himself. This was the worst decision I could have ever made.

It is funny as I think back on it. Everyone was trying to do what was best for me. Best for me always seemed to include being ripped away from all of my friends and transplanted somewhere else. Since I haven’t had the opportunity to see what life would be like for me now had I agreed to do what was best for me, I simply assume that it really would have been what was best for me. But children can’t seem to distinguish the difference between what is best for them and what they want. Since I really was just a child I was thinking only of what I wanted.

As I think about it, I bet the only reason that it all went the way it did was because of how hard I was being on myself. I was totally convinced that I had killed dad. That was something that I was trying to deal with this whole time, and I often couldn’t hold back my emotions. Throw out a few comments about how you are going to have to tell kids in your new school that you are only there because you killed your dad and the grown-ups kind of give you some leeway. I was not trying to use that as leverage in any negotiations, that was how I truly felt. So it was decided; I was going to live with my brother in Oregon.

I will go into more detail about the time spent with my brother, as well as give you some idea of the measures people went to to get ahold of dad’s stuff at a later time. Right now I want to go a bit more into the mind and actions of, well, me in the days/weeks following dad’s death.

First off I just have to mention that I had always had a dream that dad would die in a car accident. Though he was always in the Corvette in the dreams. It always happened at the same spot on the road to our house, where he would miss a corner and go careening over a cliff, not a particulary big cliff, to be found dead the next day. The death was always from drowning though. The car would end up upside down in the little creek and he couldn’t get out. Since the car had power locks and windows I have always assumed that the windows simply wouldn’t roll down and that the lock had somehow jammed (I had been having this dream for a long time before he actually died too). I believed this dream so much that I would often stop to look over the ledge, where he wrecked in the dream, on my way home from work. Sometimes I would actually get up and drive to that corner at about 3:00 in the morning just to make sure that he wasn’t laying in that little stream (I think I only did that two or three times).

There were times that I would get really worried that he might not make it home. Since this was before pagers or cell phones I had no way to make sure he was alright, but I had a system. You know how it seems like the second you are doing something that you shouldn’t be doing your parents happen to show up? That was my system, and it worked like a charm. I only really ever worried about him when he was driving the Corvette, and it would usually keep me awake until I saw his head lights come down the driveway. When I got really worried, around 3:30 or so, I would do something that I wasn’t supposed to be doing, like, say, handling one of his many guns. I wouldn’t take it out an shoot it or anything like that, hell wouldn’t even load it. I would just sit on the couch with the gun across my lap polishing it, buffing the finish on the wood, oiling the mechanisms, anything, just so I had the gun in my hands. Then, like clockwork, I would see the headlights coming down the driveway, rush to put the gun and oils away, and make it into bed just before he popped his head in to make sure I was there. Irrational behavior to be sure, but it worked for me.

It was with a similar attitude that I faced the reality of his death. I would alternate between times where I thought there would be no punishment for whatever I did, to times where I did something wrong on purpose, in the hopes that he would appear there and scold me for being such a bad son. I had always been so intelligent that it seems odd to me that I would have done such a thing, but it turns out that I might just have been in denial; as long as I wasn’t willing to admit that he was dead that meant that he wasn’t.

I did a lot of really stupid shit over the first few weeks. I mean insanely, near suicidally stupid. One thing I did was play a game of quarters with a guy twice my age. We weren’t playing it with beer though, it was Bacardi 151. I was so wasted afterwards that, I shit you not, I got into the passenger seat of my car and tried to start the glove box. He laughed at me and told me I was on the wrong side, then let me drive home. Even at .8 MPH I was hardly able to hold the road and hit the gravel shoulder many times on the two mile quest. I thought for certain Dad was going to be at the door to give me the lashing of a lifetime, he wasn’t there at all. I went to bed wondering how I had made it home at all, and where the hell was my punishment. It never came.

I never did anything quite that stupid again, but I did a lot of other crazy stuff. Once I realized that I was not getting any punishment for my actions I felt bulletproof, not a good thing for a teen. The reason that it took me so long to get around to actually mourning the loss of my father was that I had spent that entire time either at school, at work, or at a huge kegger down the street. Not thinking about it made it seem not real, at least not my reality.

The most unfortunate thing is that when it finally hit me, the very second I knew that he was never coming back, I happened to be at work. I caught a glimpse of his beard and Roseburg Lumber jacket through a window in the back room. My heart jumped. I ran like hell towards the front (where he was headed) turned the corner to see him and yelled “Da……What can I do for you, Sir?” Everyone in town had one of those jackets, it was only a matter of time before someone with that jacket and a beard would walk past that window, yet, it was at exactly that moment that I realized he was really dead. I made up some sort of an illness to get me away from work for the remainder of the night and drove away.

Away was the only destination I had in mind when I got in the car, alone might actually be more accurate. By this time we had long since been forced to move out of the house where dad died, but that was the direction that I was heading. I went past the turn to the Byron Creek Estates and kept going as the road turned to gravel. Twenty minutes later I stopped, jumped out of the car, and ran blindly down the hill. I had been here many times, but never in the dead of night. I walked the trail carefully during the day, that night I just ran blindly. I ended up in what I will call the amphitheatre (a beautiful rock formation near where I lived with my dad. It was an outcropping that had about a fifty foot vertical drop with a very small stream falling off the edge. If you took the time to walk down behind the waterfall it was even more beautiful; There was enough room that hundreds of people could have pulled up lawn chairs and watched the little waterfall, with nothing but unspoiled Oregon wilderness in the distance. -maybe I should be writing tourist guides-) stood there for a moment. Sat there for a couple more. Then I completely lost my mind.

I was pissed off. At myself, at my dad, at the earth, the universe in general. This was the first time that I was able to express that anger. I screamed my lungs out (maybe I knew where I was going after all; the amphitheatre made it sound a lot louder when you screamed, but no one was within 30 miles of the location), I told my dad how much I hated him for dying, I told myself how much I hated myself for killing him, I told God that I was going to try to sneak past St. Peter just so I could kick him in the nuts (no shit). I yelled at the universe in general. I was mad, damn it! I took my aggression out on the only thing I could find, which was, quite unfortunately, the beautiful outcropping that I previously described. (score that God/Universe:1 My knuckles:0)

How long I stood there screaming, trying to beat the shit out of a rock, I will likely never know. It seems that I had exhausted all of my energy in the endeavor, which was probably for the best. I woke up the next morning laying in the softer portion of the gravel/sand mix. My knuckles were crusted with dried blood, my voice was all but gone (something I wouldn’t learn until much later. When it come right down to it you don’t audibly talk to yourself very much), and I just wanted to get home. I was freaking freezing. The standard uniform in the food service industry may be 1)Uniform. 2)Suited to the job. 3)Forgiving of imperfections. They are also 4) Very, very thin. But, I still had to get back to my car before I would be able to get on the road home.

I have to tell you that I found it extremely odd that I couldn’t find a single footprint in the mud on the way back up the hill. So odd, in fact, that I went back down the hill and up the other side to try to find one. I couldn’t find a single footprint on either side. It had rained the night before, as I found once I got into my car, the seat was sopping wet. Yet the mud on the way down the hill was inches deep. Could the rain really have washed away inch deep footprints? Well, the hill was also very steep, I have seen rain do worse. I just thought it was odd, in a strange sort of cleansing way. Whoever went down that hill the night before was left at the bottom, the man coming up the hill was brand new. But still on the universe’s shit list…

The fucking car wouldn’t start, it had a dead battery. Some jackass must have left the lights on. No big deal, it was mostly downhill on the way back, I could just pop-start it. After 10 or so tries at the pop-start I was beginning to wonder why it wouldn’t work. Turns out that some jackass left the car running when he bailed down the hill. Once it was out of gas it sucked the battery dry as well. Just fucking perfect. I was able to roll a lot of the distance, since it really was a lot of downhill, probably could have gone a bit further but I was a bit afraid of trying to cross that narrow bridge (it had only 12 inch wide tracks) at the speed I was coasting. There was only one uphill stretch between where I was and the paved road, but there was no way I could push the car up the hill alone. I resolved to push it off to the side and walk down to the nearest house (probably only six miles or so) to buy a gallon gas.

The walk wasn’t all that bad. In fact I didn’t have to walk nearly as far as I thought I would. It seems that when you are wearing a uniform from a fast food joint, walking the edge of a deserted road, and it is pretty early in the morning, the passing truckers (logger in this case) get kind of curious, particularly if you are also carrying a gas can and a length of hose. The first truck that came up behind me pretty much locked up his brakes (he would likely have backed up to me had he not been hauling a trailer full of timber). “What happened to you?” he asked.

Shouldn’t this be precisely the point that I realize I am still in my work clothes, it is like 7AM, and I am walking down a deserted road with a gas can and a length of hose? “Ran out of gas.” I said.

“What happened to your hands?”

I looked down at my knuckles, having completely forgotten about the severe ass-whooping I dealt to that rock the night before, “I, uh, tripped over the hose on the way up here.”

The guy just laughed. He did offer to drive me down to the main road though, you know, the one that is actually paved. Beyond that, he offered to drop me off at the nearest house, which was what I was hoping for anyway. He made no further mention of my knuckles, my attire, or the fact that I was walking around with a length of hose. (I bet that trucker has a version of this same story that is way different than mine).

The up side is that the place I was eventually dropped off was the home to a man who had 1)a gasoline reserve for his tractor, 2)a set of jumper cables, 3)enough good sense to just do what the man with a hose and bloody knuckles asked him to. I did give him 5 bucks for his trouble (at the time gas was only about a dollar a gallon) and thanked him.

This was, thankfully, the last time I would have to wrestle with the guilt I feel for having killed my father.

Until the next day.

This is a story that I told briefly when I first started this website. I have never actually elaborated on it. I am going to do that today. This is the story of how I killed my father.

Dad had been pulled over many times for driving drunk. I know of at least three. His lawyer was always able to get him off on a technicality of one sort or the other (one I remember was that he was pulled over for failure to signal when turning out of the bar’s parking lot. It turns out that, at least in the state of Oregon, it is not required to use a signal when turning from private property onto a main road.) but, dad would never submit to a breath test. Failure to submit to the test automatically suspends your license for six months (dad had good reason to not submit to the test: he was drunk. He knew the lawyer could get him off on a technicality, but if he actually had a blood alcohol test on the papers that would have been a lot more difficult). I am not defending his actions, that is just what he did.

His license had been suspended for about a year by the time he died. In Oregon (all states?) if you are pulled over with a suspended or revoked license the officer will immediately cover the tags on your license plate with black and white striped stickers. The only way to get the car legal again is to either get your license back or sell the car. Neither of which my dad ever did. What he did was put the cars into my name so that they would be street legal again (when he died 4 of his 5 cars were in my name). This might be a long aside, I will tell you in a moment, once my train gets back on track.

The car wreck that eventually led to his death was on December 21, 1990. The reason he got into the car accident was that he was going to go out drinking for the night, therefore he took an insulin shot without eating anything. There was a foot of snow on the roads. He had to drive slower than normal, he never made it to the bar. He went into insulin shock on the way and rolled the van over on the highway. He was clinically dead when they found him. The ambulance that responded noted that he seemed to have alcohol on his breath, but it was really just an odor that smells like alcohol on the breath at those times when his blood sugar was really low (I just tried to google an explanation for it but can’t seem to find one. Hell, maybe it isn’t true at all. I just know that when I had seen him with low blood sugar -dangerously low- his breath did smell like he had been drinking. Yet, once a candy bar was inserted, the odor went away).

He was revived by the paramedics and admitted to the hospital shortly thereafter, where they did actually do a blood test which was negative for alcohol, and they found, from that same test, that it was just horribly low sugar. Should have all been well and good. They covered him in casts (the more I think about it I think it may have been both arms and one leg, but I know he had something on his chest as well; it could have been one of those ones that holds the arm out at an angle.), and were going to leave him in the hospital overnight for observation. Unfortunately, he had gotten a DUI not a week before that and was released on his own recognizance until the trial. The cop that had arrived at the scene of the accident happened to be one of the cops that had previously pulled him over for DUI, and insisted that he be released from the hospital to stay in jail until his trial. The doctor released him to the custody of the cop. Dad went to jail.

The people who were in charge of booking inmates, however, were not about to let him stay in their jail. With adult eyes it is pretty easy to see their logic (not the cop that demanded his release from the hospital though), which probably ran thusly, “If he dies in here we are going to get sued!” The next part I really don’t understand. Dad didn’t go back to the hospital, flat-out refused to. He had a girlfriend pick him up at the jail and spent the night at her house. (here I must note that it was not a rare occasion when he would go out drinking and not come home until the next day. He was always a smooth talker). When I got home from work at about 1 A.M. I wasn’t alarmed by his absence (also to note that the cut off for drinking was 2:30 A.M. in Oregon, so I wasn’t expecting to see him until the next day anyway).

Early the next morning the phone rang, this was also not uncommon. Sometimes dad would leave his car at the bar and ride home with his woman du joir, then call the next morning to get me to give him a ride back to his car. This was far too early in the day for that though. And it wasn’t my father on the other end of the line, it was one of his girlfriends. This was the first time I learned that he had been in a wreck at all. The first time that I heard that he had some broken bones. He wanted me to pick him up and bring him home. I had no idea of the shape he was in (though you do, thanks to horrible story telling) until I arrived to pick him up.

It was hard to imagine that this was the same man. His iron fist, my way or the highway attitude, and stern, knowing look were all gone. This was a man, in a bunch of casts, that had to be helped to the car by a forty year old woman and a sixteen year old kid. He was in a bad way, in hindsight. He was also the man without whom I would not be here typing this, wouldn’t be doing much really, likely wouldn’t have ever been created. When it comes right down to it there is a fine line between being a child and being the glue that makes those old playboy centerfolds impossible to open. He made me the former, and lots of magazines the latter (there are ways that I know).

Simply getting dad into the car was a bit of a challenge. He had a full leg cast (as I write this the condition is really coming back) which is really not the easiest thing to try to fit comfortably into a 1976 Ford Courier. He had to sit sideways, damn near at the gear shift, with his cast pointing towards the passenger side. With every bump that we hit on the drive home, which was only about 35 miles but took well over an hour due to the snow, he moaned in such pain that I hurt for him. Several times I suggested that we get him back to the hospital, he would have none of it. Once I got him home, then had to break into his bedroom (the key was left at his girlfriend’s house), and onto his bed, he seemed to relax a bit. He just continually told me that he was fine.

Dad had a phone mounted to his swanky waterbed, so did I (which it took me a year of begging to get). So he actually called a few people during the days that he lay there dying. I didn’t actually pick up my phone and listen in on any of the conversations, but I did overhear a pretty telling remark one time when I went to check on him. Though I don’t remember the exact quote, I do remember the end of the quote with crystal clarity: “I don’t remember any pain until they woke me up.” When I heard that I was afraid that maybe he really didn’t want to live. I was now really worried.

I begged him to let me take him to the hospital, he flatly refused. I went to bed that day (December 22, 1990) crying. There was nothing that I could do.

The phone rang early on the morning of the 23rd, which I believe was a Saturday. It was my Grandmother (of all people), telling me that Dad had just called her to get her to call the house, so I would answer the phone (wake up) and go tend to his needs. Which I dutifully did. Again I begged him to let me take him to the hospital, or call an ambulance, hell anything. I needed to do something other than dump his shit out of a can and bring him peaches. He was not in very good shape. He would hear none of it. He said he was fine. (In my heart I knew that he wasn’t).

I resolved to actually sleep on the floor in the room with him from then on. I wanted to be right there when he needed something. I wanted to help him get better. For the life of me I can’t decide, even in my own mind, whether he wanted to get better or not. Yet, I do know that he never got any better. I kept asking, insisting, that he go back to the hospital. He told me, sternly not to call anyone. He was fine. Yet, as I watched him slowly die, I knew that there was something that I would, could, should do. Unfortunately, by the time I did it it was far too late.

On the morning of December 24, 1990, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I knew that he was dying, and that no one other than me could do anything to stop it. When I woke up, it was to him asking me if I could get him a bowl of peaches. I got him a bowl of peaches, blissfully unaware that he had not been taking his insulin shots. Then I ran upstairs to call the ambulance. I was too scared to go back into his room before the ambulance got there, he had told me, in no uncertain terms, not to call an ambulance.

When the paramedics arrived, some thirty minutes later, I motioned for them to go to the kitchen door. I didn’t want to tip dad off that I had called them. When I opened the door and explained the situation, mostly that they should expect him to be pretty ticked off that they were here at all, one of the medics said, “where is he. We just want to do a couple of tests”. I led them to the door to his room, then said, “sorry dad, I had to call them.” And the medics went in.

The rest was just a flurry of action. I could see medics talking into boxes, saying things like “no breathing. No pulse. Starting CPR (CPR being something that I had actually learned that year at school. Might have been helpful had I used it on him somewhere near the time he actually died, eh?)”. It went on, “Not responding to visual stimuli, blackened residue emitted with chest compression.” It was at roughly that point that I thought to scream “He’s Diabetic!” (might as well have screamed “he’s Mormon” for all the help that was). I really, really wish that this story had a happy ending. Unfortunately it doesn’t.

I had sat there for two entire days watching my father die. I didn’t call the ambulance because he told me not to. Once I decided to defy his order it was too late. Had I used my newly discovered CPR skills I might have kept him alive until help came, but I was too scared of how mad he would be that I called the ambulance and was too afraid to even check in on him before the medics were there. Turns out I should have checked in on him.

The coroner’s report (there was an autopsy since the death was not supervised, whatever the hell that means) said that the cause of death was ketoacidosis. It is also known as diabetic coma. His blood sugar was damn near double the level that they consider fatal. Yes, he died. At my hand, no less.

I am pretty sure that dad knew that not taking his insulin shots, then eating really sugary foods, was not a good thing. I figured that the reason he asked for a can of peaches shortly before he died was because he hadn’t been eating anything and needed to level his blood sugar out, since the insulin shots lower it so much. Had I known that he hadn’t been taking the insulin shots I would probably have reacted a lot differently. Who knows.

I kept taking the canned fruit to dad because I thought he had been taking his insulin. Had I known that he wasn’t taking his insulin I would never have done that. Hindsight, I guess. It may be 20/20 but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. For all intents and purposes, I killed my dad.

It would be wonderful to blame the police, or the doctors, or, hell, anyone but me. The fact is that it was me, and only me, that could have saved his life. I didn’t. I watched him die. It was all me. I could have driven him to the hospital when I first picked him up, I could have called the ambulance at any time the two days he was at home. Instead I waited until he was already dead (I didn’t know he was already dead). I guess I am not much of a son in that respect.

After the medics had been working on him for about a minute I knew that there was no use. The medics continued to work on him as I went to the phone in the dining room and started calling people. The first person that I called was my friend David, I was hoping he could come over to keep me company during the ordeal. It was his father that answered the phone. I asked for Dave and his dad told me that Dave was still asleep. Then, (odd that this is one of the things that I will never forget) I said, “Sam, my dad is dead. Can you wake Dave up?” A moment of silence, then, “Call 911!” came from the other end. Once I assured him that the ambulances were already there working on dad, Sam finally did wake up Dave. Though I really don’t remember him being there for a while. Truth be told I don’t remember a lot of what happened for the next four hours.

I continued calling people. The next call went to Dad’s Mother. The only thing that I can remember about that phone call is that the first thing she said after I told her that dad was dead was, “Don’t let them take the furniture!” I don’t know who she thought ‘them’ was, nor why that would be the first thing that sprung into her mind, but that was what she said. I made calls to every relative I could find a number for, who in turn called every other relative, and soon the word was out.

I might try to convey myself as being calm and collected, it was a hell of a situation to be the only person involved in at my age, but the truth is I probably wasn’t. When the coroner backed his suburban down the snowy hill to the front door I jumped up, ran to the door, and screamed “Don’t take the furniture!” I thought I was making a joke based on what my Grandmother said, but no one around seemed to see any humor in it at all. Those around being only medics, the coroner, and some police, who were currently questioning me.

I don’t remember a word of what I said to the police. I don’t even remember a single question they asked. I was just sitting there, tears in my eyes, yet not willing to cry, shaking uncontrollably, wishing it would all be over soon. Then, and it seemed quite suddenly, everyone was gone. It was just me and Dave. How long Dave had been there is something I just don’t know. Oddly, once I realized he was there, I realized that I really wanted to be alone. Not away from Dave, mind you, just alone with my thoughts for a bit. Before he left, Dave opened up the garage door, pointed at dad’s corvette, and said something like “It really is yours now.” Which was true, it had been in my name for quite a while…

I was sixteen. My father had just died. I had a corvette at my disposal. There were exactly two things that I really needed to do (well three). First, I really wanted to go see my girlfriend, she had such a soft shoulder and I really needed it at the time. She was only fifteen at the time and, it turns out, the shoulder was indeed soft, but so was the mind (I don’t know if she was able to grip the fact that he was dead at all), there was no way that she could have known what I was going through, she did the best she could though. For that I must thank her.

The second thing that I had to do was not because I wanted to. The police didn’t want me, the minor child, to be staying unattended at home (how attended I had been over the previous couple of days didn’t figure into that logic), so I told them that I would go to my Aunt’s house (the one who is my dad’s twin). I actually did go to her house. Not because I was planning on staying there at all though, no no, this was all a part of my mission to get to the last thing that I really needed to do.

The third thing that I needed to do was get that corvette out and see what it could do. Which was a pretty stupid thing to be doing on extremely icy roads, but I was sixteen and for some reason (even beyond age) just didn’t give a fuck. I had to drive from my house to Myrtle Point (where the aunt lived), it was about 50 miles I would guess, over one of the most winding roads I have ever seen. There were a couple of straight stretches on that road though, which is how I can tell you, from first hand experience, that the ’70s era corvette is completely capable of going fast enough that the needle passes max on the speedometer (which went to 160mph). Though at that speed the scenery looks like you are going into warp speed on the Enterprise.

I stayed up there only for a few minutes, it seems. The aunt thought that I should go ahead and live with her while completing school. I thought I would rather have died on the way. I think I really did hit warp speed on the way out of Myrtle Point. That night I slept at a friend’s house, I think it was in Roseburg, but it could have been near where I lived. Hell I might have even spent it at my house, I really don’t know. Then, then it all started to get really crazy…

It takes so little to entertain a child, well it took very little to entertain me when I was a child. I really was one of those kids that would play with my new toy at Christmas for a few minutes, then get hours of entertainment out of the box that it came in. And I wasn’t alone.

There were railroad tracks mere feet from our door, there was a river just beyond them, there was a creek in my back yard, there was also a small park (with a huge ass tree in it) just across the tracks. There were so many ways that I could have had fun, but that was for personal fun. No one else really played in any of those areas. There were a couple of seasons, however, where everyone in my block liked to engage in the same two activities. One was to tube down College Dr. (which, of course, only worked in snow) and the other was to take a run down cardboard hill.

I don’t know if the cardboard hill thing existed anywhere other than the particular block, on the particular street, in the particular town where I was living, but damn those was good times!

It was really a simple concept. Behind Jason Friedman’s house (well, technically it was his parent’s house) there was a big old hill. In fact they actually had a strange terrace of car tires buried into the hill behind their house to keep the hill from flowing down and destroying it. Those made for an excellent ladder to get to the top of the hill. The hill itself was nothing more than a bunch grass (well something like grass) that would be dry and yellow at the correct time of year. It was easy to knock it down (usually just took a few runs down the hill on a piece of cardboard), and carve trails to zoom down on a piece of cardboard.

When the season was right we would all go dig through the dumpsters behind the Albertson’s store, which was less than a block away, and try to find the best, largest pieces of cardboard that we could. If you had a wimpy piece of cardboard it would likely tear out on the way down and leave you with a blistered ass, and a run back to Albertson’s to find another piece (what is totally unfortunate is that we all lived in Oregon. Oregon was way ahead of the curve on recycling. The majority of the cardboard from the Albertson’s was put into this huge compressor thing and recycled. The best we could usually find was some small scrap no bigger than 12 inches square).

Once the hay weeds grass whatever the hell was covering that hill was pushed down, it acted like sex wax on a surfboard. Imagine barreling down a hill, completely out of control, no steering, no brakes, no protection, on nothing but a very thin piece of cardboard (unless, of course, you happen to be my mother –who actually does read this– so for her sake let us pretend that our safety measures went beyond the ‘just jump if it gets too bad’ mentality –which they did not– ). Good times.

There was a blackberry bush right at the end of the run, how close you got to the bush was a sort of character building machismo kind of thing. If you rode your flimsy little cardboard close enough that the briars actually stuck your little sliding body as you bailed, that meant you were a dare devil. Of course this was at the time that television was airing (I am not going to link to them) The Fall Guy, The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch and The Smurfs. While the Smurfs might not seem to be such a motivational factor in all of this, considering the other programming, the Smurf’s was really the biggest motivation. Nobody wanted to be Brainy Smurf, you know, the guy who didn’t fit in.

Each kid would speed down the hill on his/her (no female entity would be stupid enough to try this) tiny chunk of refuse (call it what you will. I saved many pieces of cardboard from the local landfill, for a few days at least), each successive run would make the path a bit longer. Eventually it would lead to the patch of briars that separated us from the unknown (well it was known, even to me, but I have to save the reveal for later).

So you sit on a piece of cardboard and then let gravity take its course. You end up totally tearing ass down the hill. I don’t know what the top speed acquired on that hill was. It seemed to me that it was akin to a rocket launch, or at least a Dragster, but I was quite young at the time. Memories do have a way of glorifying the past, don’t they?

It so happened that one of us found a watermelon bin behind the Albertson’s one day. If you have never seen a cardboard watermelon bin I will give you a brief synopsis. It is a huge piece of cardboard, way thicker than any normal cardboard. It is stapled (with seriously heavy-duty staples) at its only break. The dimensions that matter are that it was about 30 inches tall (which translated to 30 inches wide for riding purposes), it was at least four times thicker than normal cardboard, and it looked like it could really survive anything (the thing was about a half of an inch thick FFS).

We were all pretty young at the time. We knew what Math was, but only in an abstract manner. 1+1=2 for sure, but acceleration, gravity, velocity and other such was a bit beyond our reach. So, in our infinite wisdom, we called this piece of cardboard “the truck” and decided that we would all ride it down the hill together. Big Mistake.

Looking on this with my adult eyes (or what pass for them around here) I realize that this was pretty damn stupid. While “the truck” was certainly the best piece of cardboard ever, it was also enclosed on the front and back (when you are doing what we were doing), which meant that you have no idea which way you are going. Gravity will take its course and you will be at gravity’s mercy for the rest of the ride. Of course I was young and stupid, one of those two, I am happy to say I have overcome, but I am still stupid. I really don’t think that anyone who jumped into “the truck” went on to be a math major.

Our little minds didn’t seem to put together the 2+2 equation. We had no idea that having four of us in “the truck” would make us accelerate a hell of a lot faster than just one kid on a piece of cardboard. We tore ass down that hill! Since we were now in an enclosed traveling device, no one knew when we were getting close to the briars. We tore ass through them as well. We had, at this point, gone fifty or so feet further than anyone else had ever dared. Not on purpose, mind you, had someone voiced concern over getting close to the briars we would all have bailed, but no one did…We were in for the whole ride…

That was when we went careening off the cliff. No nets, no wires. We all went off the cliff, quite fabulously, with a piece of cardboard as our vessel. We all hit with a thud. It was a thankful thud, as I noticed that everyone else had immediately exited the vehicle. There were whoops and cheers up above, coming from the people who didn’t just crash their cardboard into asphalt, they thought it was the best thing ever. I couldn’t even ham this one up, well, I suppose I could have, but the wet spot in the front of my pants might have given me away.

I don’t even think that we were gods for a single moment; Once the other kids knew that the fall to the street was survivable, not to mention that we had mowed down the berry briars in advance, they came in droves to try it. Damn my luck.

I had the opportunity to visit cardboard hill when I was 20 years old. The hill was only about fifty or sixty feet down to the drop. The drop was only about six feet. It seemed so much bigger back when I was so much smaller.

Still, good times. That is an experience that you will never forget.