Curious and Willing Part 2 (The Quarry) (331 hits)
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Submitted by simplemindedhafwit (View user info) at 2008-10-10 19:23:44 EDT
CURIOUS AND WILLING Part 2 (The Quarry)
When I was four we moved back to Atlanta from Savannah. We had moved to Savannah a couple of years earlier because Dad took a job there. I guess it didn't work out so well because when we moved back to Atlanta we lived with my Grandmother for a while. Violet was her name but we all called her Nannie. She was the greatest! My parents Jack and Janelle bought a house soon after. That would have been in 1964. It's 1968 and it had been my castle for four years. It wasn't much but it had a sturdy red brick frame. Hardwood floors throughout was the nicest thing about it I guess. But back then hardwood floors were the norm. It wasn't something you would have installed like today. They came with every house in that neighborhood. A little town just South of Atlanta called Ben Hill Georgia. It had three bedrooms, one bath, a hallway, a living room / dining room combo and a kitchen. We didn't have air conditioning or a washer and dryer. We were lower middle class with one car. Mom didn't work a job but she had three kids to take care of. A daughter, a son and a full time job, me.
Dad worked every day but it seemed he always had time for calling balls and strikes or making up silly games in the backyard. He was always able to some how manage things and make life look better than it really may have been. He was good at that! We didn't have much, but for me it seemed as if we lived like royalty. I had everything an eight-year-old boy could ask for. A yellow lab, boxer mix named Poochie, who was the smartest animal I've ever had the pleasure to spend time with. A big flat front yard just made for gaming. An even larger back yard, and just beyond it the woods. Acres and acres of untouched Georgia woods. It's as if they were planted there just for me. I was a bit of a wild child. I am the youngest of three children. My brother is three years older and my sister ten years older. She wasn't around much. It was the late sixties and she was the hippie type. She was pretty and had lots of friends to spend her time with. My brother and I looked similar but were about as much alike as a Fair and a stare. He was a thinker and I was a doer. While he was reading or studying, I was running through the woods with Poochie or swinging from tree top to tree top with my best friends Russell and Alan. We used to make a game of it. Climb a tree at the edge of the woods and sway it over to the closest tree by rocking it back and forth. Once you get close enough to the next tree, reach out and grab a limb, pull it toward you and move on to the next tree. If you came to a point, where you couldn't grab the other tree and had to climb down to get to it that was a point against you. We would try to make it all the way through the woods to the EZ Mart without ever touching the ground. About a half a mile or more I'd say. I can't recall now if anyone ever made it all the way without touching the ground but I like to think we did. The rules were who ever the most points against them, that loser had had to steal something from the EZ without being caught.
School was out for the summer. The three of us were collecting coke bottles for money. We had a pellet gun in mind. Our world then was a mix between Stand be Me, The Bad News Bears and To Kill a Mockingbird. By the way, everything that's soda is called a Coke here. You can ask someone, "Hey want a coke?" and the reply might be "yea get me a sprite, or I'll take a Fanta Grape." My favorite Coke that you can hardly find any more is Orange Crush, the one with the cork seal under the cap. I used to pull the cork off and chew on it. Don't ask me why because I don't know. Most likely, something I saw in a movie. There was a Coke machine in front of the laundry mat in our neighborhood. It had a thin door that opened to reveal the caps of the various chilled bottles. You would put in your 10 cent, yep 10 cent, open the door and pull out whatever Coke you wanted. Then another would fall into its place. "Chocolate Soldier" man I loved those things too. When we would camp out we'd sneak over to the laundry mat late at night with a bottle opener and straws. Open the door, pop the top, stick your wide-open mouth up to the bottle, and let it pour right in. Then suck out everything else with a straw. I guess one of the reasons I loved the chocolate soldier so much is because that chocolate stuff would stay at the bottom and I would suck out every morsel of it with the straw. Plus everything tastes better when it's free ya know. Like free dairy product. I tell you nothing tastes better than free dairy product by a warm fire. After raiding the Coke box in the middle of the night, we would wait until the wee hours of the morning and follow the milk truck. Doorstep by doorstep we would gather free dairy product. The milkman would leave it and we would remove it. Milk, eggs, butter, cheese and on special occasions, bacon! Take it all back to base camp and dive in like jackals on a fresh carcass. As I said, everything tastes better when it's stolen... I mean removed... I mean free...
A regular size coke bottle brought 3 cent. A large brought 5 cent and the wooden crates they used to stack them in brought 15 cent. FIFTEEN CENT! There were two grocery stores in our neighborhood. They would put the wooden crates behind the stores in fenced areas. The fences were about 8 feet tall with no top on them. We would simply remove the wooden crates from behind one store and return them for money to the other store. Then a few days later, we would do the same just opposite. Man people must have been dumb in those days. Considering we never got caught doing it. A kid could make a good living finding, stealing and returning bottles and crates on the weekends. You could find bottles everywhere. We would even stand around the barbershop, stores and gas stations trying to buy empty bottles form people for a penny. But most of the time they would just give them to us. We knew how to look pitiful and knew just what to say to get what we wanted.
This particular day we were going to cash in the bottles and crates, buy something to eat, maybe a pack of smokes and jump the train that went by the rock quarry. The quarry had a nice natural pool at one end that was great for swimming. All of this happened as planned. There's a knack to jumping on and off a moving train. You have to get the rhythm and speed of the train. Run along beside it and slowly pull yourself up. When exiting you do the same and angle away from it. One occasion a railroad man caught us. I pulled myself up into an empty car and there he stood in cap and overalls. "What do you think you're doing boy?" he said in an angry voice. Without reply, I jumped right back off the train. The first thing to hit the ground was my bare chest in the gravel mound that the cross ties sit on. Then I flipped head over heels for what seemed like an eternity until coming to rest in a bunch of briar bushes. We didn't wear much clothing then. All I had on that day was shoes and shorts. Or hand me down cut off blue jeans that my older brother had worn out and grown too big to wear. As bad as it sounds it was nothing really. I shook it off, cleaned up in the creek, and limped back into battle.
Luckily, this ride went smooth. If you've never stood in an open door of a box car with a Marlboro hanging from your mouth watching the world slowly go by, then you haven't lived. It almost as good a feeling as eating free dairy product by a warm fire, almost. We made the half mile or so walk from the tracks to the to the quarry's edge without any problem. I loved the sights, smells, and sounds of the woods in Georgia! The tall pines, the sprawling hardwoods, the red clay, the sweet smell of honeysuckle, it was a living dream like for me. I guess we were, or I was somewhat of a naturalist. I can remember days when we would leave the house at day break and not return until after sunset. We would literally "live off the land" on those days. Drinking milk weed, creek water, or anything that had moisture in it. Catching, cooking and eating crawfish and minnows, trying all kinds of greenery, nuts, berries, and fruits. In addition to anything we could steal.
We normally went down to the quarry floor around the left side. Although it was a longer walk, it was a bit safer. I'm not sure why, but on that day I wanted to go around on the right side. Exploration reasons I suspect. I tried to get Russell and Alan to do the same and come explore with me but they complained that it was hot and they were more than ready for a cool swim. I was a bit bull headed and started out by myself on the right side. The weeds were tall and a beautiful tan color, softly waving back and forth in the breeze. They were in all the fields around town. I always loved how the wind seemed to cut a channel through them when it would blow just right. A secret path is what we called it. We also called them kindling because they were great as a fire starter.
The ground close to the quarry had small crevices cut in it from water erosion. We would have called them "big ol ditches" but I guess they were really small crevices. I would walk a while through the high grass, jump a ditch and walk some more. All the while looking for something that might be of interest. I came to a large crevice that was too wide to jump and too deep to go into. I worked my way closer to the edge of the quarry where the crevice narrowed up a bit. Looking at the other side I decided I could jump it with a running start. I backed up 20 or 30 feet along the edge of the quarry to get up a head of steam. I ran as fast as I could through the tall grass and just as I got to the edge of the crevice I pushed off. The ground on the edge of the crevice gave way on the last step and I stumbled. I'm sure I looked like a one legged frog trying to make that jump. I landed about half way down the other side. I guess the lack of good footing caused me to land wrong and I began to tumble the short distance to the edge of the quarry. Now let me tell you I was a good lander. I had landed on and jumped from about everything. But I was bouncing around between the walls of the crevice like a sock in a dryer. All the while thinking to myself, I had to find some way to stop before I spilled out into the quarry. The momentum of the grade was more than I could manage and there wasn't one thing to grab on to. Then it happened. The sky seemed to opened before me. It was too late. I was there. I couldn't get stopped and the dirt walls I had been bouncing off were gone. Blue sky was everywhere.
Looking back on this I realize why I'm so infatuated with adrenalin. I really am. I am very curious about it and I try to learn as much as I can on the subject. What it does to our system when it's released into the blood stream is amazing! It increases survival possibilities by enhancing everything needed within us to survive such as sight, smell, hearing and motor skills. It even speeds up our brain and reroutes itself around all useless internal non-survival systems at the same time. That, to me is simply miraculous! I have experienced it more times than I really want to admit to and I'm in awe of it every time. It's so powerful, it's so natural. It's almost a spiritual feeling. It kicks in and just completely takes over the body and mind. It wants us to live. It's the best defense against death that we, as humans retain naturally. I have had a number of near death experiences since this one. I've been on the edge so to speak with death coming as close to me as life. Adrenalin has kicked in every time and saved me. On this particular day, I was equipped with something more than just natural adrenaline. I had some help from the outside. I had a guardian angel. I had met her two years earlier when I fell from a tree. I used to wonder if it was the adrenalin that gave me hallucinations and led me to merely believe that there was some kind of higher power at work. I used to try to convince myself that it was all in my mind. But it's happened too many times. I've witnessed it in situations where it was a warning before something bad had yet to occur. There's no doubt in my mind that it was her, my guardian angel.
I sprung from the bowels of that crevice like a cannon ball. Tumbling into the wide blue yonder and flopping around like a baby bird just learning to fly. I must have dropped fifteen to twenty feet before I landed on a slab of granite and leveled my body against it. I began to slide toward the edge at a rapid rate on a thirty to forty five degree angle. The granite was like rough sandpaper. I wasn't wearing shoes and all I had on were cut off blue jeans and an unbuttoned fatigue Army shirt with the arms cut off at the shoulders. The granite began to grind through my skin like a parmesan cheese grater. As painful as it was I knew the only thing that would stop my forward motion was my body weight. So I painstakingly pressed it as hard as I could against the rough rock. Then, as if a magician waved his magic wand and said "stop!" I stopped. I was dangling at about fifty feet from the quarry floor, holding on to a rounded off slab of granite by nothing more than my raw, blood stained skin.
As I clambered around with my feet, searching for anything to rest them on, I realized there was nothing below me but the bottom. My heart was about to explode! My breath was in short supply. I had little white dots before my eyes and my skin was on fire. My first thought was to scream for Russell and Alan but as I tried to take a breath strong enough to let out a scream, my stomach would lose grip on the rock and I would slip further off the edge. As we sometimes say in the South, "I was as stuck as a Thanksgiving pig." If Poochie had been there he would have barked for Russell and Alan or ran and brought them to me. But we jumped the train and Poochie was waiting at the tracks for my safe arrival. Then it happened. She touched me. I felt her warm hand once again. It was like a heated cushion on my back. Just like the time before I immediately felt safe. She pressed hard against my back and said "shhhhhhhhhh" This time I know I wasn't yelling. This time I know what I heard. This time there was no doubt she was there.
I held that rock with everything I had and stayed as still and quiet as I possibly could. My heart rate dropped back down to normal, my breathing was okay, and the little white spots in my eyes were gone. I just waited. I assumed that sooner or later Russell and Alan would come looking for me. Just like an Octopus I had a body grip on that rock. I was even clinging to it with my face. I could see the bottom of my arm and it was covered in blood from the slide. I remember thinking, why doesn't my arm hurt? It was hurting just a few seconds before. Why doesn't it hurt now? After what seemed like and hour or two but was probably more like a few minutes I tried to scoot myself up some to get a better body grip on the rock. Then it happened again. I felt her press against my back and say "shhhhhhhhh." So I did what I believed she wanted me to do and just laid still.
I guess it must have been about thirty minutes or so and I heard Russell's voice above me yelling "WHERE ARE YOU?" I managed to squeak out a faint "over here." They came to the edge and I heard Alan say. "Man you fucked up this time didn't you!" I didn't reply. They stumbled around up there trying to figure out how to get down to me. They finally removed their jeans and tied them together at the legs. Russell lowered Alan down close enough to grab my shirt and the three of us made it to the top. Rolling over the edge of that cliff and falling over in the grass was one of the most wonderful feelings I have ever known as a child or as an adult. I don't think I have ever felt so safe in all my life! I was covered in new and dried blood. I had lost two toe nails from the grinding and my face looked like someone took a belt sander to it. Oddly enough my first thought was, how am I going to explain this to Mom. All the way back home we went over all kinds of scenarios of how I could explain why I look like I did without actually telling the truth. If we said I almost died at the quarry who knows what might have happened. We didn't want to lose all the opportunity we had with our freedom.
We finally decided we would say it was a go cart wreck. We were at the park and I rode a go cart down a hill, the tire came of and I tumbled over and over on the asphalt. PERFECT! It might work. They might just believe it because the markings all over my body did resemble an asphalt mishap. We would say it and stick to it for the rest of our lives. After riding the train back to the sand and gravel yard. I got cleaned up some and we headed home. Poochie was waiting as always and relentlessly sniffed and begged at me. He knew things wern't right. As we turned the corner to our street I asked the guys what made them come look for me. Russell said, "What the hell are you talking about, you were yelling like some silly little bitch up there" I didn't say a thing. I knew they wouldn't understand. I had mentioned her when they came to see me in the Hospital after falling from the tree. So I just whacked Russell on the shoulder and said "I ain't no bitch, BITCH! I knew they would have said "yea what ever pussy." So I kept it to myself. I kept it between her and me. I kept it just as Russell and Alan wanted it to be. They were the hero's. They had snatched their best friend from the jaws of death. Unfortunately for them they wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it because of the pact we made about the go cart crash. But I knew who really kept me alive. It was her, my guardian angel.
Russell wished me luck" and hit the trail between the houses to his and Alan went on down the street to his house. I must admit that ol red brick not much for nothing of a house looked more beautiful than anything I had ever seen in my life. When I was hanging off that cliff, I wondered if I would ever see it again and there it was as big as Christmas. I knew I would stay close to it for a while. I needed it's comfort after what I had been through. Poochie ran ahead, turned and barked as if to say "come on lets go. I've been waiting for you all day and I'm hungry!" I hobbled up the front steps and pushed the door open. There sat Mom on the couch. She looked up and said just words I needed to hear. "Don't you come in this house with all that blood and dirt on you, get around back and wash off with the hose. I'll bring you a towel."
User Reviews
Submitted by Berty (user info) at 2008-10-13 07:49:04 EDT (#)
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Submitted by Snark (user info) at 2008-10-11 02:37:40 EDT (#)
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blah blah blah
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I will have you know that the only reason that I am poor is because my dick is so massive that I rent it out as the Eiffel Tower and I have to spend all the money from that on maintaining my awesome member. So you can fuck off with your unfounded assertions.
*kicks computer to death*
Submitted by Snark (user info) at 2008-10-11 02:37:40 EDT (#)
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The huge block of text is frightening.
All the male uberusers who can't afford an SUV or 4X4 with big fucking wheels are going to look at your post, then at their dicks and kick their computers to death.
The rest of us (who aren't female, and therefore stupid) are going to look at our dick and then watch 300 for the 50th time.
All the while your text goes unappreciated.
OR
You could reformat and repost in a way that doesn't make mongoloid computer geeks (like us) around the world open their skulls with rusty spoons and eat their brains without really understanding why.
Just a thought.