Damn-Foolery

Years ago, my high school English teacher, Mrs. Banks, told my class about a time she and a bunch of teenage girlfriends “borrowed” a car and went joyriding in a field—in the dark. To make sure no one would see them during the commission of their crime, they decided to turn off the headlights. I believe the story ended (abruptly) with the girls driving head-first into an irrigation ditch.

My brothers have epic tales of driving a variety of unreliable vehicles up Rattlesnake Mountain (near Cody, Wyoming) and then getting stuck and being forced to walk all the way home (not an insignificant distance) and getting either our dad or one of the hired men to drive back up the mountain with them to pull them out of whatever predicament they’d gotten themselves into.

My father-in-law, Bear, loved to tell my husband and me about the time he and a bunch of buddies skipped school and drove his dad’s Model T onto a big, ice-covered lake, where they proceeded to do donuts until the ice broke and the car sank into the water. His father, as you can imagine, was most displeased. According to Bear, “It was hard to explain to my dad how I was supposed to be in school, but the car wound up in the lake.” All summer long, he had to carry buckets of fresh manure from the pasture to the manure spreader as penance.

In the teen novel I’m currently writing, the two protagonists, Duffy and Dewey, get drunk the night before the first day of their senior year of high school and decide to take a BB gun and try to shoot out the taillights of cars as they pass by on the interstate—with dire results that will haunt them for the rest of the novel.

I was always a very obedient child—and the only girl in the family—so I can’t recall any damn-fool activities I ever participated in when I was high school age. Honestly, I was so afraid of my mother’s anger, I didn’t dare put a toe out of line. However, I’ve embarked on a number of enterprises later in life under the ignorant conceit of “Oh, how hard can that be?” and belatedly realized that I badly misjudged how difficult undertaking a certain task might be.

How about you? What damn-fool things did you do as a kid?