The Stories of My Youth
by Lorem J. Fause
The Stories of My Youth
Copyright (C) 2010 by Lorem J. Fause
Cover drawing by Lorem J. Fause
Book design by Vanessa L.
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Table of Contents
Story 1 Cut
Story 2 Newton's Apple Tree
Story 3 How to Kill A Raccoon
Story 4 Vertical Wrecker
Story 5 Reset Button
Story 6 Street Sign
Story 7 Firecracker
Story 8 Potatoes
Story 9 Milk Carton
Story 10 Ricochet
Story 11 Grandmother’s Shed
Story 12 Hold the Door
Story 13 Water-Skiing
Story 14 Egg on Their Face
Story 15 Blast Off
Story 16 Just our Luck
Story 17 Artificial Pneumonia
Story 18 Decapitation
Story 19 Whizzing Bullets
Story 20 Jacuzzi
by the Author
These are the stories from my youth that have weathered the erosion of time. Now that I have made 50 plus circuits around the sun, I feel that it is safe to put them in print. The statues of limitations have expired and the players have all grown or moved on.
Many of these stories share a singular theme, the idea that I've been really lucky. Not lucky in the sense of winning at bingo or the lottery more than the average person, but in that I am still alive after so many mishaps and misadventures where natural selection would normally have selected against a peculiar set of traits.
Perhaps there is some caution in these stories that others might find profitable. The same propensity to think abstractly rather than pragmatically that motivated a school boy to dive head first into a snow pile also propelled me through to degree in mathematics and a successful career as a computer software architect. If a child appears to particularly devoid of common sense, they might yet have a bright future. Just make sure to instill in them some sense of caution.
I want to thank the people who made this book possible. I thank my wife for proofreading the drafts as they emerged over recent years. I also thank Vanessa aka “Boo” who edited the book into its present form. She's already a better writer than I and yet she is barely in her teens. I truly think this collection of stories will ultimately be known as her first book instead of mine.
April 3, 2010
Cut
First Grade
In the fall of my first year of school my brother Jim and I went together to the town fair. We walked the mile and a half each way by ourselves, and spent our scant savings on rides and games. It was a great adventure.
The fair was a yearly event back then, and we looked forward to it the way one would look forward to the first flower of spring or the first snowfall. It offered up wonders the likes of which we would not see for another year. There were rides that seemed to defy gravity, agricultural and scientific exhibits, and games of chance.
There are no town fairs anymore, perhaps because of the cost of liability insurance, or perhaps because six and seven year old boys are no longer allowed to travel a mile and a half through town to squander their savings in trinkets and thrills. The world is a smaller place now.
Well, that particular year was a grand one. We dared ourselves to try the 'big kid' rides like the Hell-Diver that rotated its occupants both horizontally and vertically at the same time. The Hell-Diver had two pods each of which held up to four people. When one pod was being unloaded and loaded with for the next set of passengers, the other pod's occupants were, by design, kept suspended upside down at the height of the ride.
We also played the games of chance. Back then the laws of economics had not yet been discovered, at least not by us. We would eagerly spend 25 cents for a chance to win a 20 cent prize, but the prizes were so valuable to us then that I can still remember a few of those that I won. There was a very realistic miniature tin mailbox that occupied my imagination for months if not years afterwards. And there was the plastic cigar that would shoot out a rubber flame when puffed. I was a curious little guy and had to know how that flame worked.
The actual details of that wonderful day at the fair in the mid 1960's are lost to memory but what followed was indelibly etched in my mind. When we got back home after a day at the fair, my mother was busy getting supper and my father was relaxing at the dinner table. I remember having to use a serrated bread knife rather than a straight-blade knife to cut open the cigar. Holding the cigar between the thumb and forefinger and thumb of my left hand, I sawed into the cigar with as much pressure as I could muster. The plastic material was not easily severed but when it finally and suddenly gave way, the knife continued into the flesh of my hand only stopping at the inner bones.
It's odd which things we remember about the traumatic events of our lives. I must have quickly yelled that I had cut my hand off because I clearly recall being scolded by my father for having said so. He asked why I would say such a thing that would have frightened my mother. Distracted from my wound, I begrudgingly saw my father's point. My father and I then started a brief argument about the finer points of what to do and say in emergencies when he saw the gaping cut extending halfway across the palm of my hand and decided to cut the discussion short and head for the local emergency room.
What followed is mostly a blur now. There was a point where a nurse put what looked like an astronaut's mask over my face and I felt a gently floating descent into the land of dreams. The next memory is that of my first grade teacher, a nun named Sister Grace Irma, reprimanding a classmate about a poor score on a spelling test. "How could you only get (whatever) for a grade? Jerry got a 100 and he can only use his right hand because his left is in a cast!" I also remember wondering if that student understood that I was right handed, and the cast probably had no effect on my score.
Newton's Apple Tree
I learned physics at an early age, the hard way. During my youth, my family would often visit my paternal aunt's house, especially during holidays. My brothers and I would play with our 5 cousins, most of whom were approximately our ages. My aunt owned what was once a small farm and there were outbuildings, stone walls, overgrown orchards and forests to explore.
One winter day, we children were playing games and making up imaginary adventures in the freshly fallen snow at my aunt's farm. We were romping around the farm buildings and stone walls, when one of us got the idea to climb the low-hanging branches of an apple tree and jump into a mound of snow piled below it. The tree sat alongside a stone wall that bordered the main path leading to the back woods, and the path had been plowed from its start out front by the farmhouse to as far back as the apple tree. The snowplow had left several piles of snow in the vicinity.
The other kids had already climbed the tree and started jumping into the snow when I caught up and began climbing. We were all excited at the idea of leaping into the fluffy pile, I more than most apparently. When the mound was clear of previous jumpers, and it was my turn to leap, I excitedly decided to try something different and dive headlong into the snow pile.
The trip from branch to snow covered ground was only about 6 feet in height so the effect of the impact on my spinal chord and vertebrae was minimal. After a monetary spell, I regained consciousness enough to realize that what I had taken to be a fluffy pile of snow pushed up by a snow plow was in fact a mound of rocks left over from a gap made in the stone wall. The snow was only as deep as the last storm's depth, about 8 inches. The headache that I got from the fall lasted a few days but the lesson it taught me was strong enough to get me through two years of physics classes in high school and college.
How to Kill a Raccoon
Elementary School
My brother Jim and I had a trap-line when we were in elementary school. A trap-line, in case the reader is not familiar with the term, is a series of traps laid out along a watercourse with the intent of catching wild animals for the use of their fur and sometimes for their meat. One of our next door neighbors was an avid outdoorsman, in the sense that implies hunting, fishing and trapping, and he introduced us to the raw and very real business of trapping wild animals for their fur. Somewhere, hanging in the back of closets or in boxes in attics, there are garment with fur collars or fur-lined hats and gloves that came from the fruits of our efforts.
Our neighbor taught us how to trap in winter. The routine we learned was timed around our school day and more importantly around the time when the animals would be active. It was important to set and check traps while the creatures were away from the area where the traps were placed. The traps were typically located near the animals' dens to maximize the chance of actually catching them, so the best time to set traps was in the very early hours of the morning shortly after the animals first venture out for a morning meal. This meant that my brother and I had to get up regularly at 5:00 a.m. on winter mornings.
The traps we were to use were called leg-hold traps. They were made of strong steel and were designed to clamp the leg of any creature that stepped on a small metal plate in the center. Wild animals, not being entirely stupid even by human standards, avoid stepping on metal objects. The trick to successfully setting a trap is to conceal it by placing it in an obscure location where an animal might have to place a foot, or by covering it with mud, grasses or other natural material.
Setting a trap requires careful consideration. Aside from being in a location where an animal might travel, and being obscured from sight, the trap must also kill the creature quickly. The primary motivation for quickly dispatching the trapped animal is to prevent it from escaping or damaging its own fur. We were in the business of trapping for profit and a lost animal was lost money. There's really only one practical way to kill a creature with a leg-hold trap and that is to drown them. To accomplish this, the trap must be secured far enough under water so that the trapped creature cannot get a source of air.
We chose the location for a trap based on the kind of creature we hoped to catch. To catch mink, we would set traps along their runs, which we would find by looking for their footprints along riverbanks, over logs or through paths in the snow. For muskrat and beaver, we would place traps at places along the bottom of streams where we thought they might travel. As mink were rare, we only set traps for the latter.
A big part of a trapper's routine is, well, routine. The traps must get checked daily so that predators, of which there are many kinds, do not devour the trapped animals' carcasses, and therefore the profits. Each morning before school we would walk about three miles to the start of our trap-line, carrying any new traps we wanted to set plus a hatchet for breaking through ice, a small shovel for digging holes, and a bag for any animals we caught. Once at the trap-line we would take turns checking and setting traps. If there was fresh fallen snow, the first challenge would be to find the traps. Once found, the next challenge was to cut a hole through the ice to gain access to the trap. If the trap was successful, we'd have to get the carcass out and reset the trap. We took turns not out of fairness but to avoid freezing our hands.
Our neighbor had let us use his traps with the stipulation that we pay for any traps that were lost out of our profits. He did the actual skinning and tanning, a task we dreaded dearly, and so we got only a portion of the going rate for skins. Sometimes we'd lose a trap, perhaps because we forgot it's exact location or perhaps an animal dragged it off. Still we made a few dollars from the dozen muskrat we caught that winter
One morning late in the trapping season, Jim and I had walked the two and a half mile length of our trap line and, coming up to the last trap, found an enormous raccoon caught in the trap, hissing and spitting at us as we neared. We were stymied. We had not seen a live animal in a trap before. True we had found a severed foot in a trap once. It was a grisly reminder of a creature's will to live that it might chew off its own leg in order to escape. This raccoon had clearly begun to gnaw at its leg above where the trap grasped it, but only slightly so. After brief discussion we ruled out trying to release the animal. It was in no mood to perceive any effort to do so in friendly terms!