Mischief & Adventure - Part 2

In addition to the magnificent elms that lined the streets of Lowry, the village was home to some of the best apple trees I have ever stolen from.  [There I go, compounding the crime by ending a sentence with a preposition]  

One of the most enjoyable times of the year was apple-ripening time. We would go out foraging for the best fruit in town. Foraging was our word for grand larceny. My top three targets were Lionel MacIver, Bob Bennett and Ole Hoplin.  Of course, we could have gotten all the apples we could possibly eat, just by knocking on the door and asking, but the thrill of the pilfer made the forbidden fruit so much sweeter.  The expectation that someone might come bursting out the door made this guerrilla warfare thrilling.  Even apples from my grandparents’ tree seemed to taste better, however the guilt was terrible - made me sympathetic with Eve. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t born Catholic. I could have confessed to theft, but I could not have honestly promised not to do it again, regardless of the required penance.  We also occasionally went after Chester Bennett’s rhubarb and seasoned it with salt, but I thought it was crazy - rhubarb was meant for pie (with plenty of sugar). I just tagged along. Gave me a stomach ache.

We were also big on combat games.  The preferred weapon for this was a rubber gun.  A rubber gun was a homemade contraption that fired strips of rubber cut from car inner tubes.  You cut out a piece of ½ plywood in the shape of an extended barrel “Buntline Special” and used heavy rubber bands (bands, not binders) cut from inner tubes to attach a snap clothespin to the handle to serve as the trigger.  Then you put one end of a looped rubber strip into the “close-pin” and stretched the loop over the end of the rubber gun, being very careful not to shoot yourself in the eye. Your weapon was now armed and you were ready to search and destroy.  This was a single shot weapon and reloading was Civil War speed. The range was about 10 feet so it required close combat, making stealth tactics mandatory and swift feet if you missed an essential survival skill in this game.

Big Time had a rubber gun about 3 feet long, giving it a range and muzzle velocity three times the rest of us.  He was also wont to tie knots in the ammunition, so when he connected he knew it by the howls of pain. (As you know, the world sees constant technology advances, particularly in weaponry) However, Big Time’s gun was notoriously dangerous to load and he received as many self inflicted wounds as he delivered. Not much of a comfort to us though.  We liked to use the woods below the school for our combat zones but we ended up losing so much ammunition, we had to switch to open space.  We spent a lot of time begging Frankie for old inner tubes to rearm, and if we could get our hands on a red inner tube we were in hog heaven – for these were much stretchier and pliable than the black, giving us greater range and safety of loading.

We were also the inventors of splat-ball, but we never capitalized on it. We were playing combat by the elevator and Utta found an abandoned bird’s nest with several eggs and decided that they would make good grenades. But the eggs were decidedly unfresh and the game ended abruptly amidst the interwoven smells of hydrogen sulfide and vomit. H2S. My first practical chemistry lesson. My mother made me shed my clothes in the back yard.

When we got bored with the confines of our little town, we launched expeditions on bikes to some outer reaches of our universe, sometimes up to 5 miles from town. One destination was the dump grounds. The dump was located on the east shore of the lovely Horse Lake. Anton lived on the hill above that lake and walked into a left hook when he asked in a hardware conversation if anyone knew why the lake was named “horse”.  “We’ll, it has the shape of a horse’s head on the north and the other end lives on the hill to the east.”

Besides ordinary garbage, people hauled whatever they could fit into their pickup trucks out there – refrigerators, furniture, scrap metal, radiators, tires...  a treasure trove for scrounging kids, albeit a bit environmentally questionable. It tended to be a bit on the fragrant side in hot weather.  One happy pastime was courtesy of a lucky kid who had a BB gun. We took turns trying to nail the occasional rodent or two.  I think the weapon was confiscated when the little brother caught a ricochet in the face.

Chippewa Creek was another explorer destination. It crossed the east-west state highway 55 under a culvert about 3 miles west of town. It was lined with trees and was a great place for our war games or floating home-made warships down the "crick" or feeble attempts at swimming. Post-excursion often required a trip to McIver’s for some calamine lotion to combat the poison ivy.

Lake Malmedal to the south was a little more ambitious one speed fat tire bike ride, mainly because of the up-and-downs of 114, with the ups predominant on the return trip. The Bjerke hill outbound & Hedlin hill inbound were killers. But Malmedal was a true lake and you could swim or even try to catch a fish. (However, serious swimming with diving boards and such was in Minnewaska or Pelican - swimming lesson tales for another day.) In '38, during the dust bowl years, Malmedal was a hay field, completely dry but refilled by a single massive downpour. I, of course, did not witness this but I have it on good authority.

Lowry proper topology is flat and flatter. This was a real problem in winter when the sledding urge struck. We could have gone down Arnold Hedlin's hill on 114, but we were not so stupid to be found sledding on a state highway. So the prime destination was Bunker Hill.  We would trek east across Smisek’s fields, tramping through the drifts, pulling our sleds and toboggans to reach that mountain. (Mary Hill was along the way and actually steeper, but didn’t have the long run of Bunker).  One problem with Bunker was the barbed wire fence at the bottom. You had to roll off your sled before it sailed into that fence. It was a long hard slog to get there, and the weary return worse, so we didn’t do this too often.

Worst case, we would slide down the snow piles created from clearing the alley behind the hardware store, or jump off Bosek’s store roof into a snow bank. But the skating rink and crack-the-whip offered stomach turning thrills more easily.

Fireworks were illegal in Minnesota, but that just made the acquisition more exciting. A couple of entrepreneurial Lowry boys with an old car would take orders and make the trip across the South Dakota line to Sisseton and return with a treasure trove of explosives, sold at a reasonable markup. I would spend some of my hoarded baseball card stash to get a few packages of Black Cats, but I never went for the big explosives, like M80’s or bottle rockets or cherry bombs.  It was a problem to hide this contraband so my folks wouldn’t learn of my foolishness.  The motto “keep your powder dry” eliminated any outside location and we didn't have a garage, so I stashed them in the space between the freezer and the wall in the back entry.

 

Some big spenders set off entire packages at once like Chinese New Year, but I hoarded my precious few for a WWII battle in Big TIme’s sandbox.  We would set up our toy soldiers in fortified locations and then lob Black Cats to simulate grenade attacks, sending the plastic figures flying. Another favorite contest was to light a cracker beneath an empty pop can and see how high it would fly.  Bragging rights to anyone who could get it to land on Bosek's roof.  

The perpetrator of these transgressions shall remain anonymous, but on occasion a firecracker found it's way into a frog's mouth and on one occasion a cherry bomb exploded in a spring fed concrete water tank to ill effect on the tank. Retribution from the hand of the father was swift and firm.

And duds - what to do with them?  Waste not, want not.  We would break them in half to expose the powder and light it and watch it sizzle - and if you had leather heels, stomp on it.  

Surprisingly, no missing appendages.