1966

Now what good would a smart phone have done?

1966.

One of the things a smart phone will not do for you, is to fully illustrate the power and majesty of the universe. Pictures aside, it could never be the real thing. At this point in my life, I can reminisce. Something I have to share may be enlightening, to someone.

The year was 1966. Two boys wandered about the summer countryside, as boys who live in the country often do. Although they didn't honestly realize it, they were out and about looking for trouble. That was because, well, boys will be boys. At least, that's what they say. Or, used to.

When boys grew up in the countryside around this era, there weren't a lot of the things one might have found in the far-away and unknown cities, or even in a small town. No packed movie theaters, no corner gas-stations with sticky-buttoned pinball machines, no pretty girls, no vacant-lot baseball games. You only had the things you could see. What these young fellows saw were fields and forests, and lots and lots of private property. Nevertheless, if you looked, there were lots of cool things to mess with. And mess with them, these two boys always did.

On the way to anywhere, the grasshoppers and katydids hummed their music, and the relentless summer sun baked the roadside grasses, filling the hot breezes with the indescribable pollen-laden scents of a country summer. The boys so far had no destination, perhaps the little Clover Farm store over in the next hollow, where they could get birch beer or Nehi sodas. Between where they were and the store, there was a township building where road maintenance equipment was garaged.

Over behind the township building, there was a patch of scrubby woods where the township had set up a small yellow steel dynamite shed. The building was made of stocky steel angles and was covered with thick sheet steel, yet there was only a light steel padlock on the door. Many times before, the two had discussed breaking the lock with a hammer and taking some dynamite. The best illegal firecrackers you could buy were about one-quarter as powerful as one stick. Wouldn’t a whole stick, or three, be super-neat?

But one of them was against it, because of the potential for disaster, and because he knew that taking dynamite was really something with the power to upset someone. And that would probably be enough. So, they settled for just letting the township guys know that someone could have taken it. A big rock and a broken padlock, which they then threw into the brushy woods, was as far as they went. On, on to the Clover Farm store to get a cherry Nehi.

There were always places to explore, too. The nearest town was built around the quarrying and mining of high-grade limestone. Although there were plenty of natural caves in the area, any one of which could get you into a real jam, they selected an active mine site to explore. Did they know for sure it was active? Nope. Did they care?

Not really.

On a Saturday, the hillside where the shafts entered the earth was a quiet place. There was absolutely nobody around. Video surveillance was hardly in use anywhere, certainly not here.

First, they came upon a mine ventilation portal. There were two gigantic, roaring fans, probably eight feet in height, running at fairly high speed, direct-driven by huge electric motors. Standing outside the chain link enclosure, they could feel the suction of those fans. They discovered they could turn their backs to the fence and allow the powerful draw of the fans pull them up against that fence. The chain link was rusty and probably weak, but they never even thought about that detail. They thought it might be interesting to chuck something over the fence to see what would happen to it, so one of them picked up a large rock. Once again, the slightly less adventurous kid decided that had too much potential for disaster. So they satisfied themselves with sticks. They laughed gleefully as the sticks exploded on the huge blades. After a while they tired of that, and moved on.

They came upon an unused, deep, narrow quarry. “Deep”was likely three hundred feet. There before them was a very narrow suspension bridge, supported by fairly thin, rusted cables. The sole purpose of that bridge was to support a trough, through which a small, but rapid and extremely cold stream ran. That was because the stream would have entered the quarry without the suspended trough. It really wasn't meant to be crossed by people. But of course, that made it a challenge, so the boys did just that. The bridge swayed, interestingly enough, but it stood firm.

Further up the hillside, they came upon an ancient mine entrance. Many years before, it had been capped with heavy oaken timbers. But weather and neglect had destroyed that cover, and now they had a gold-plated invitation to get into lots and lots of trouble. The sides of the entrance were ancient concrete, jutting about three feet above the wooded ground. An old iron ladder that was anchored to the concrete inside, brown and pitted with rust, extended down into the darkness. One of them had brought a flashlight, because he had wanted to find and explore caves. But the two d-cells with an incandescent bulb, made in1966, didn't even begin to show them anything. They only knew it was a deep hole.

An argument ensued. On the one hand, the ladder was iron. On the other, they had no idea how strong it was, how well it was moored after all that time, or even if it extended all the way to the bottom of the pit. And after all, what did they expect to find down there?

The argument came down to just how deep it was. So together they picked out a big rock that would probably never see the light of day again, heaved it up onto the wall, and rolled it into the open hole.

It was a very long time before they heard anything at all. It may not have been minutes, but for sure, there was enough time for that rock to reach maximum free-fall velocity. When it did finally strike something, it continued to bang, and drop, and clatter, and drop and bang some more, for quite a while. They never did hear the final thud they expected to hear. The sound of the strikes got to be too faint.

The boys looked at one another, and without a word, headed back for the bridge.

Arriving back at the mine site, the boys came upon the actual entrance the workers used, to go down into the active mine. There were three cars sitting at the top, on tracks that dropped steeply into the mine. It was something they'd never seen before, so they went to check it out. There was a steel roof built over the cars, and four corner posts supporting the roof. Ever-adventurous and meddling, one of the two pressed a button that was mounted on one of the corner posts, to see if any of the cars would move. They didn't, but there was a very loud buzz. So he pushed the button multiple times.

Within thirty seconds, they heard the roar of a huge Euclid truck on its monster tires, as it came tearing up the hill toward where they were. Terrified, they ran like hell and dove into a big open culvert that was carrying the water from the suspension bridge, further down the hill. They thought they were as good as caught, but the driver and his passenger must have just missed seeing them. They crouched silently in the culvert as the Euclid wheeled around and around, and the men looked for whoever had pressed the button. Eventually they realized that the only place the miscreants could have gotten to was the culvert, so they got out of the truck and sprinted for it. The boys had been watching, and they then dove into the woods beyond the culvert and ran as hard as they could, down over the hill. Luckily, the men did not follow.

Realizing the men would probably try to find them near the bottom of the hill, they walked for some miles along the hillside before finally descending the hill to the railroad tracks. They amused themselves after that, walking along the railroad tracks and pulling all the airbrake handles on the parked freight cars. Eventually that brought someone too, so they decided to call it a day, and to go fishing, which is what they had told their parents they were going to do.

That was Saturday, with Sunday coming along right behind it.

Sunday was UFO picture-day. The two had already thrown a rock tied to clear monofilament fish line, over a tree limb and hauled their model flying saucer into the clear space beneath it. Somehow that wasn’t good enough. After all, one could still see the branches overarching the scene.

So the plan had two objectives. The first was to hike to the top of a mountain and frisbee-toss a steel band cymbal, out over the valley. No one could claim, then, that the things was supported by an overarching tree. Of course, it was an all-day walk, so something else was clearly needed, to make it all worthwhile.

So the mission became a two-fold effort. One was to weight down a full-size bedsheet on a rock-covered bare spot near the top of the mountain, for bragging rights; the other was to get their faked UFO photo. They left mid-morning, with those objectives in mind.

Arriving on the mountain top in late afternoon was the plan, the sun now at their backs and the majestic view of the valley before them. One stood ready with a Brownie Starmite 127 camera, and the other gave the steel band cymbal a mighty heave, out over the valley.

Unseen before them was a mighty wall of updraft from the valley below, for as the afternoon air, heated in the valley during the day rushes for the sky, it follows the surface of the mountain. Oddly, down on the surface of the mountain there was no disturbance.

But when that heavy steel cymbal entered the updraft, it immediately shot straight up and quickly disappeared from sight.

The two boys never saw it again, nor did they get a picture. I suppose there should have been some ‘splainin’ to be done about the missing cymbal, but, the boys reasoned, they hadn’t asked to take it. They had just taken it. Mum’s the word, they agreed.

The mountain they had ascended did have a Jeepable road that went most of the way to the top. That was because a nearby airport had installed a beacon light there, which at this point, was gone. All that remained was the steel tower that had supported the beacon, miles of copper-coated steel wire and a transformer, on a pole at the summit.

Had that transformer not been there to tear down from the pole, the beacon tower there to climb or all of that wire to roll up, the day might have been a total loss. Because the sheet was barely visible from the valley floor. The distance and height were too great.

The two boys might have spent Saturday and Sunday enriching themselves on their cell phones.

Of course, they didn’t.

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