I am going to take you back a few years to a time that although may not have been all that simple and easy going at least it certainly seems so in this old man's mind. The year was 1958 and I was eight years old. My family and I lived in the small Illinois' town of Hampton on the banks of the Mississippi River. We only lived in this village for less than two years, but those few months were apparently very impressionable as my ages of seven to nine years in this life are vividly, and most often fondly, remembered. It was a time of Elvis and Rock 'n Roll. Of Saturday morning cartoons, the great ones, Bugs Bunny and Popeye, cartoons that were made for adults during the war but were just as enjoyable to us kids. The Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody, The Lone Ranger and Dick Clark's American Bandstand, just to mention a few, were all on the air. A time of long hot summer afternoons spent on the banks of the large rolling river, skipping rocks and fishing with friends. At the same spot along these banks where we went fishing, I learned how to ice skate on its frozen shores. Much to my father's dismay I had gotten a pair of figure skates for Christmas. You see he wanted me to have a pair of hockey skates, but I had insisted on figure skates because of the serrated points. I thought they would make me go faster. He thought boys should only have hockey skates and that figure skates were for girls. I do believe my preferred choice of those sissy figure skates may have wrongly given him cause to be a bit worried about his oldest son.
In the winter we would go sledding at the Illiniwek Park hill. It was a nice long steep hill situated across from Highway 84 and overlooking that big beautiful river. At the bottom of the hill was a gravel road so bales of hay were placed in order to stop the kids from hitting the gravel with their sleds when they came to the bottom of the hill. Now a pile of hay is nice and soft and gives way when you jump into it. But a bale of hay is compact, compressed and hard and it does not give much once you run a sled into it, it is somewhat akin to a soft brick wall. I don't know who thought of placing these bales of hay at these strategic points, but I must assume whoever it was never hit a bale of hay while speeding face first down a slippery, icy hill on a sled. Maybe it was someone who did not like kids.
Just before you reached the bottom of this hill, and before you hit the bales of hay, was a shallow trench about two feet wide that ran across the entire width of the hill. It was probably man made to help with the runoff of the water from the hill when it rained, and the same child-hating guy who put out those bales of hay was probably the one who had dug it. Depending on the depth of the snow this little 'bump' could, and would, cause a various number of exciting finishes to your little, and until now, joyous yet routine sled ride. If the snow was deep enough and filled this trench when you hit this bump the sled would stick in the deep snow. Of course since you were not strapped onto the sled, or nailed to it, you would continue on without the sled, usually somewhat airborne, if only for a split second before you crashed into the hay. But, if the snow was not that deep and so did not fill up this trench, you and your sled would hit this 'dip' at what seemed a blinding speed and with such force that it would shake your little pre-adolescent world and rattle your teeth. Many a child was violently separated from his or her sled in this rough manner. But of course, that was the fun of it! For if not for these 'crash landings', all of this sledding was merely reduced to a quick ride to the bottom of a hill and a long tiresome walk back up it to do it again. But the best part of all of this was that once in a while great moment when you caught this bump at just the right speed, with just the right amount of snow cover, at just the right angle, and you could withstand that bone-jarring jolt to hang onto your sled, where you and your sled would become airborne! And that my friends is what eight year olds live for, of course just a few feet away, that glorious flight would always come to an abrupt end with the meeting of the child, the sled and bales of hay.
It was on a beautiful warm spring day when my soon to be ex-friend Tim and I found a snake pit beneath an old oak tree on the banks of the river. Now I am not sure what kind of snakes they were except that they were water snakes, white and small. Baby snakes. If they were indeed water moccasins then how we did not get bitten and die is beyond me. I would just have to guess that God had decided that Tim and I should get to live a little longer, at least long enough to pay the consequences for what we were about to do. After what we did with some of these snakes I am sure that my parents were not exactly in complete agreement with the Lord on the length of my continued longevity. We captured some of these little rascals, about half a dozen and put them in a can. We then went to my house. A big mistake, and for the life of me I do not remember what in the world we were thinking at this point, that is if we were thinking at all. My father was a part time fisherman who ran trotlines in the Mississippi. Thus he had some nylon strings cut in six-inch lengths that he tied fishhooks to and then tied at intervals along the 100-foot trotlines. Tim and I took a number of these six-inch nylon strings and proceeded to hang the baby snakes by their little necks from my mother's front porch. Needless to say, she was not at home at the time. We then went to hide behind the corner of a neighbor's house with the fiendish hope of seeing the excitement when one of my sisters came home and saw the snakes. Unfortunately it was not one of my sisters who came home first, it was in fact my mother. As we saw her car pull up and park in the street near the house, Tim disappeared; I have not seen or heard from him since. Alone I watched horrified as this dear, unsuspecting woman got out of her car, shut the driver's door, opened the back door taking out two heavy paper bags of groceries and tucking them under each arm as she hip checked the door shut.
Now, have any of you ever noticed how people walk when they are in a familiar, friendly environment? Well, most people walk with their heads slightly down, looking just a few steps ahead of where they are walking as they think of this and that, of how the day has gone or of what they are going to do next. And thus this is how my sweet mother walked up that quiet peaceful sidewalk to our little happy home in Hampton that day. The lady never raised her beautiful head all the way to the little porch, nor took her eyes off of the first step as she proceeded upward onto the concrete landing that set beneath the front door of her cherished home. A home that was about to be changed forever for one little scoundrel who was now hiding behind the corner of the neighbor's house and who could not decide whether to run out and warn his mother before it was too late or to disappear forever like his ex-buddy Tim. Upon stepping onto the second and final step before the landing my mother finally raised her head to look at the front door. But instead of seeing the door she came face to face with a tangling baby snake just inches away from her nose.
It is said that even today if you are in Hampton, Illinois you can find an old timer who remembers that day and the horrible blood curdling, bone chilling scream that echoed across that peaceful Mississippi valley from Rock Island to Clinton, Iowa. In later years I once met a woman who swears she heard my mother scream that day where she lived all the way down south in Keokuk. It is said that the animals in the woods and forests froze in their tracks, that the birds ceased flapping their wings in mid-flight and fell to the earth below, that the cows did not give milk for a week after, that for the next month all the hens in the area laid only hard boiled eggs, that in its centuries old rush towards the gulf the waters of mighty Mississippi itself hesitated and that the fish stopped swimming. It has also been stated as fact that the men in the shops and factories all up and down the river grabbed their lunch buckets and headed for home because they thought the factory whistles had blown to end their day.
But I do not know if all of this is true, for all I can tell you is what I heard and saw at that precise moment when the loving, nurturing life I had known until then came to a sudden and noisy end. My mother screamed so loud and fiercely that all of the poor little snakes instantly died of heart attacks and hung limp on the strings. She threw both bags of groceries so high into the air that it rained Wonder Bread, cans of peas, Campbell's Soup and Navy beans for the next five minutes. For some unknown reason known only to him, my father loved those Navy beans. And my mother, somehow, magically turned into an Olympic sprinter and was down the street and half way around the corner to the schoolhouse before she stopped and before that last can of tomato soup hit the ground. Now it is a scientifically proven fact that when an eight year old child sees and hears their mother scream in such horror that the child too will unwittingly start screaming themselves. And that is what happened here. As my mother ran she would let out one scream after another, pausing only to catch her breath so that she could scream again. At each pause in her screams could be heard my little voice imitating hers like an echo coming from behind the neighbor's home in reply. Thus my answering screams were to be my undoing for as she ran she realized that her screams were being repeated and so she stopped to see from hence the echo came. Spying me, standing beside the house screaming, she halted her escape and came after me, knowing instantly and needing no further proof, who had hung those nasty little snakes from her once sacred porch.
As I stood there watching her, and screaming, it took me a second or two to realize that my mother was now coming after me. As she swooped down on me like a hungry hawk, I saw in her once beautiful loving and caring blue eyes that on this day I would not have to wait until my father came home to get one heck of a spanking. Now it is also a scientific fact that when a human being, even a child, is confronted with a life and death situation they instantly decide between the tactics of fight or flight. Well, an eight year old boy is not going to stand there and slug it out with his mother, besides as angry as this woman was she would have kicked my butt. So I did what any of you would have done, and ran like my pants were on fire in the other direction, still screaming by the way. By now I was starting to go into shock, not just because I was realizing what was going to happen when she finally caught up to me but also because my mother was saying some words that I had never even heard before. She was calling me names that were from some other language, like one of those science fiction alien movies and I thought for one brief moment that she had changed into something from outer space! Upon reflection I find that this is a very interesting situation where it may be the only time a child and a wanted felon have anything in common. And that bond is that in their futile attempts to escape their pursuers the culprits are only making the forthcoming punishment that will be metered out once they are ultimately captured even worse. Well, I will not go into detail on what happened when my mother finally captured her tormentor, lets just say that I didn't sit down for a very long while and that my Dad got his hand in on the action when he came home anyway. To this day I hate snakes, can't stand the sight of them. As for my mother, from that day on till this, and she is now eighty-six years old, she has never again called me by my given name and refers to me only as 'THAT Boy', with the emphases on 'THAT'. Oh yes, and by the way, Tim, if by chance you are reading this, my Mother still wants to talk to you.