The Box

When it comes to ills spewing from a box...Pandora has nothing on me!

Let's face it I was a runt growing up.  The size factor seriously hampered my athletic endeavors. Particularly when I played Little League Football.  Teams were determined by age and weight.  I always had trouble making weight so I was forced to play on a team that was a step down from my age group.  Even then I was one of the smallest on the team, but as you will soon find out I could take a licking and keep on ticking.

As you travel southbound on 1300 East from 3300 South in Salt Lake County you find yourself suddenly going down a fairly substantial hill.  This hill wrapped around a strip mall shopping center to the west and a grove of trees we called "The Oaks" towards the south east. This outcropping is part of the infamous Wasatch Fault line where geologists say it's not a matter of if, but when the Earth will move.  Yes, I grew up in the shadow of an earthquake waiting to happen.  Our football coach managed an apartment complex that sat right at the top of this hill and we would often catch a ride home with him after practice.

 It was twilight, the time of day the Scots call the gloaming;  when the sun is still trying to hold on to its last rays but is fighting a losing battle as night time creeps in.  It was a clear fall night and four of us still fully clad in our football uniforms were making the trek down the 13th East hill when we encountered a box off to the side of the road.  This was not your ordinary run of the mill box, this was a huge packing box that easily measured four feet by four feet.  It was big enough it could, and as we found out, did stop traffic. 

Paul, who would grow up to be an attorney, gave the box a solid kick sending it sliding out into the middle of the roadway about halfway down the hillside.  We gave it no further thought and continued the march towards our respective homes. It wasn't long before the first car past us and as mentioned the dusky time of night caught the driver off guard as we heard a screeching of brakes as he stopped due to the presence of our box in the middle of the road.  About this time the second car passed us only this time there was no sound of screaming brakes only the sound of metal on metal as the trailing car slammed into the first vehicle.

It took but a split second for the four of us to realize what had happened and we took off running as fast as we could.  The owner of the first car having already exited the vehicle in an attempt to move the box spotted our flight and called out after us.  But we paid no heed. Instinctively we were aware this was our home ground and we knew, or thought we knew the best escape route though the backyards and alleyways that would eventually lead us to the safe haven of home.

As established I was the smallest of our lot, but I was also the fastest and soon I was leading the way in our escape.  Going westbound I raced through the driveway and into the back yard of the Sudbury residence.  It was there we experienced our first hurdle.  A four to five foot wide flower bed edged at the back by a six foot tall fence.   The fence was constructed of long sheets of plywood alternately woven between the supporting posts. This obstacle wasn't unlike anything I hadn't easily cleared many times in my past.  On approach I felt like a jumping horse in the English Derby.

There is a line in the movie Monty Python and the  Holy Grail where a young King Arthur must answer a question before he is allowed to cross a bridge.  The gatekeeper asks "What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"  What, you may ask does this have to do with my predicament.  Well, this swallow about to take flight was NOT unladen.  Remember I was in full football gear which actually proved to be a bane and a boon to my existence that night.

Timing my leap to safety I planted my push leg into the soft dirt of the flower bed expecting to launch myself up and over the barricade.  Unfortunately the dirt gave way under my foot and there was a failure to launch!  My "airspeed" proved to be insufficient as my helmet and shoulder pads met what was supposed to be an immovable fence. I smashed right through that old fence with pieces of wood flying all around me like shrapnel from a grenade. My friends who were trailing me poured through the gaping maw I had left in the fence.  We were now in the Chamberlain backyard and they lived down a long driveway which led to the street I lived on.  There was to be no other misstep on my errant run that night and I soon found myself safe at home.

Our church sponsored our Boy Scout Troop and the night of our misadventure with the box was our regularly scheduled scout meeting.  The four of us sat quietly in the back of the troop gathering hearing every creak and groan the church building had to offer.  We were sure we could hear the footsteps of the police, the neighbors, or the car victims scurrying down the hall way in search of the four horsemen of their apocalypse.  If we could tally up the toll for the damage that occurred that night it would be two wrecked cars, a flower bed destroyed, a fence in serious need of repair and one damnable box.  As the demons continued to haunt us through that long and insufferable night...we all hoped that the long promised earthquake would arrive and we would all have been mercifully swallowed up.

Life on the Mill Creek Part 1

Life on the Mill Creek Part 1

Before becoming a world renowned author, Mark Twain, then known as Samuel Clemens earned his living piloting boats up and down the Mississippi River.  Life on the Mississippi is his memoir of those days.  Not too unlike Twain a body of water played an integral part in my life.   Since I don’t have a big publisher standing by to print my memoir the plan is to share various stories in serial form about my life and times on the stream that flowed quite literally in my backyard.  Thus I present the start of my own memoir, Life on the Mill Creek.

In the spring of 1848 less than a year after the Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley John Neff dug out the millstones he had hauled half way across the continent and built a flour mill at the mouth of one of six canyons in the Salt Lake Valley.  The establishment of that mill gave the canyon and the stream flowing through it an eponymous name…Mill Creek.  Over time there has been some disagreement on whether it is one word or two other than that very little had changed along the banks of the stream through the years.  Civilization grew up along those banks but the rocky little waterway remained mostly unscathed by the encroaching population during the years of my youth.  

Whenever I "ran away" from home the rocky little stream was my escape, the place where my affinity for water was formed and dreams of pirate booty and sandy beaches fueled my imagination in a land locked city far from the ocean's shores.  What better way to cool off on a hot summer day than to plop down in the stream bed and let the water flow over you. Water which only minutes earlier were the remnants of the winter snow pack high in the Rocky Mountains now headed towards the Great Salt Lake. Hours were spent inside the culverts which run under the roadways, pouring over the real treasures found along the creek bed; discarded men’s magazines which had been left, I presume, by older boys who had also discovered the isolation found only along the banks of the flowing water.

Being a guy means the world is your urinal and my friends and I would often find ourselves competing against each other to see who could pee furthest across the bucolic stream.  One of the guys was quite simply more endowed than the rest of us...so he had an advantage in these contests but it never deterred our efforts to span the waterway with our own streams.

The placid little stream would often become a raging torrent during the height of the spring runoff causing property damage and a threat to lives. Government agencies soon stepped in and altered the stream bed in an effort they called flood control but we called it the first water park in the county.  This new recreational outlet led to many other adventures which played out along the banks of my creek, adventures which will be spelled out in more detail in future postings. 

By birth I am a Leo, a fire sign but I have a lot of water in me.  My wife is a Pisces yet she has a lot of fire in her soul.  She is the yin to my yang.  Angie introduced me to another watery haven where we escape as often as we can.  Southern Florida has become our home away from home.  We sit on the beach watching the giant cruise ships traveling along the coastal waterway. The faint sound of steel drums hammering out their calypso beat wafts over the waves.  We have discussed taking a cruise ourselves.  But I am not a fan of these floating hotels.  I prefer to get down into the water and feel the tides as they pound shoreward.  It is there, enveloped in the tidal ebb and flow that I am transported back to my youth and those halcyon days played out along the banks of the Mill Creek.