This is the fourth in an ongoing series of posts in which I reminisce for no apparent reason about the ups and downs of being a boy of the male gender growing up in Anchorage. This may be the last post on account of I haven't started a fifth and my birthday is bearing down on me. So unless inspiration strikes, this is as far as we go. You're probably relieved. But if you'd like to read about my near brush with incarceration, you want the first post. For tales of the ubiquitous act of summer fishing, it's the second post. And for jumping off of perfectly good roofs into perfectly unsuitable things, it's post three.
I suppose it happens with girls, too, but every boy I ever met had at least a small fascination with bugs and reptiles/amphibians. Now, Anchorage is fairly short on its supply of dangerous creatures of the hold-in-your-hand variety, though it has plenty of will-have-the-better-end-of-a-car-crash variety. Moose. Goodness those things are big.
But the crawly things are more interesting to boys of a certain age, and oddly, though I'm incredibly creeped out by spiders I generally approve of all other bugs. I'm not even slightly afraid of bees, and I've been stung on more than a few occasions. I can't remember if it was BF2 or SF who tried to smash a hornet that was on my finger, which is odd since you'd think I'd remember who was to blame for that sting. I do, however, remember us making up a jingle to the tune of "Doo-dah Day" (Camptown Races). Something like "Seth got stung by a bee today, Doo-dah, Doo-dah." It's right up there with the Underwear Bites the Dust song.
Aaaaanyway. I remember we used to dig in the dirt on the outside of the hockey rink boards (Yes, our grade school had a hockey rink. It also had a non-boarded ice rink for sissies.) as it was one of the more reliable places for finding beetles. And well, land beetles are cool and everything, but how much cooler are water beetles? Seriously.
Of course, this required a trip through the Dirt Hills (ahh…the Dirt Hills), to the barren wasteland beyond (my sister's church is there now, but it used to be devoid of civilization for a good two mile radius over there). The land sloped downward somewhat, and there was one of those wonderful things every boy loves: a vast and scummy pond. To this day I'm convinced it wasn't just water but some sort of industrial runoff from a secret underground nucular reactor (spelling it the way I said it back then).Image may be NSFW.
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We started frequenting the Frog Pond, as it became known, quite frequently in both summer and winter. Oddly, we never actually went out on the pond in the winter. Hmm…we probably did but didn't realize it because it was frozen solid. I'll need fact-checking from one of the BFs. If I could just get BF1 on Facebook!
I don't really recall that we found all that many frogs there, though that was our primary objective in frequenting the place. Certainly we saw a few, though not nearly as many as I found with my lawnmower that time. I think both BF1 and BF2 were there…And here I'd better digress:
BF1, BF2 and I used to travel around with two mowers and a weed-whacker and try to scrape up some arcade/A&W money (This was after BF2 could drive. He was a year older.) Oh, and yes we were still video game obsessed. But we got a mowing gig somewhere in town near a lake (which is most places in Anchorage), and here I was, cutting the grass, when that sound we all recognize as "bag's full, gotta empty" starts happening. But I'm sure I *just* emptied it. So I roll the mower back to see if there's loose clippings on the ground.
Nope, just an eighth-grade biology lab gone bad. There's a procession of a bazillion frogs hopping through the thick grass, with the stragglers in various stages of hacked to pieces under my mower. One of them was literally cut in half, with the bottom half on the ground and the top in the grass-catcher. Shocked, I called my buddies over. We laughed at the disgusting. Then we fired up the mowers and finished the job. (Okay, I tried to avoid the rest of them. Good times.)
And we're back! To the story, that is. The first time we found the Frog Pond, we found lots of cool bugs and probably a frog or two. But the main thing we found were these sweet six-foot Styrofoam blocks. Like maybe six feet by two feet by a foot thick. How had that Styrofoam gotten there? To us, there was just one possibility: God wanted us to go on that water. And when the King of the Universe gives you the ability to walk on water (okay, sit on water), you do it!
It took maybe a millisecond of calculation to confirm that they could definitely hold one of the other guys and still float. So who's going first? As I recall, we coaxed SF into it, on account of he was half our size (never a tall kid, plus the three-year age gap). In hindsight, we talked him into a lot of crappy things. We were quality friends, I'm telling you.
With actual data, we were able to determine that SF barely displaced any water. So I joined him. Worked. I believe we eventually settled on BF1 and SF (biggest and smallest), then BF2 and me on the other one. We grabbed long sticks to pole around with and set out to sail the Great Scumknown. I swear I saw a three-headed fish in that pond. Though it could've been a duck. Or really almost anything. Looked like a three-headed fish, though. Toxic waste runoff, you know. (Whoa, I just remembered I had a dream about that freaky fish the other night. Maybe I should do a post about my greatest sleepwalking/talking hits. That could be a book!)
Miraculously, I don't remember any even slight near-drownings, probably because the water was maybe three feet deep including the six feet of scummy mud on the bottom. Yes, I know the math doesn't work. You weren't there. You didn't see this pond.
Why did we go on that green water? Well, because we could! Boys don't really need a detailed checklist of reasons for doing stupid things.
BTW, we generally traveled to the Frog Pond area in the winter looking for rabbits for my dog to chase. She never did catch one, but it was fun to pretend to be hunters.
I've been thinking that I need to work some life lessons into these posts, but most of the main lessons are "that was probably dumb." But with this one, and probably the tree-climbing one, I've thought of something. When we're kids, we tend to look for things to go our way. We tend to see the positive in things, or at least the opportunity for doing something that's probably dumb but undoubtedly fun. Why not go out on that glowing water? Looks fun! Why not jump into that cushy stuff? Surely it'll break our fall…
As adults we become more guarded, looking for the catch, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instead of "why is that Styrofoam there?" it becomes "Why is that Styrofoam there?" Instead of looking for the portentous, we look for the suspicious. And maybe it's just that life experience teaches us all those wonderful adages about there being no free lunch and if something's too good to be true, it probably is. Kids generally think if something looks too good to be true, AWESOME!
And this concludes my philosophizing for now. Maybe I'll write up some amusing bits of my history of being somnambulant. I mean, who hasn't tried to return their friend's wallet in the middle of the night. In winter. In Anchorage. Wearing only underwear? You've done that, right? Yelled for a shotgun during a spider dream? Demanded that your sister immediately and without condition RETURN YOUR RED PANTS!!!??
Okay, maybe not those, but what about accusing your wife of being a spy? Everybody's done that one, yes?