Things You First Enjoyed as a Child

Except for reading, most everything I did as a child was outdoors. We lived on forty acres and I was related to everyone, so there were very few places that we couldn't go as children, to build shacks or forts. A small river cut across the corner of our pasture so we spent a great deal of time there. It was more of a creek actually, as far as size goes but, because it emptied into Lake Michigan, it was a river. We called it a creek (pronounced crick). We would move the rocks around, creating waterways for our toy boats to float through, and build forts for our toy soldiers. We could stage crayfish fights, although locally they were called crabs. Just west of the rocky area, there was a deeper part of the river where we could swim. We once built a submarine out of an old barrel, weighting it down enough so that it would (sometimes) sink only partway, without going all the way to the bottom, and would keep the water out for a while.

Another part of the creek was wide and deep enough to serve as a community swimming hole, although it's looking pretty nasty right now, since kids don't play outdoors anymore. There, we had a rope that we could swing on before dropping into the water. That swimming hole was known as the cement bridge, differing it from the other nearby bridge, which was made of wood. The wooden bridge was too rocky, and there were broken bottles that kept anyone from going in there barefoot.

Across the road from our house was a woods that happened to be the place where the town used to be, before a fire destroyed it during the same summer as the famous Chicago Fire. Deserted, and without even a road that led there anymore, the whole area had grown up into woods, but there were foundations of houses and an occasional wall, and sections of track. Best of all, the orchards had gone wild so there were apple trees, cherry trees, pear trees, plums, and even grape vines that had grown over trees and the ruins of old houses.

We built shacks on the foundations of old houses, and camped overnight in them. Every year, when I was in elementary school, we would save up money to buy the materials for the summer shack, since we built a new one every year. One year, we formed a club in school, for which we collected dues, paid largely by people who didn't live near enough to us to ever use the shack that we were going to build with the money. We collected pop bottles, I saved the money from my Grit route, and by the start of summer, we had a collection of money that we'd take with us to the lumber yard to buy new lumber, nails, and tar paper for the roof. Many years later, I was thinking about it and realized why it was that we always had just enough money to buy what we wanted -- the owner of the lumber yard was giving it to us for whatever we had.

There was Boy Scouts. My dad was the scoutmaster. During the year, there were weekend camping trips or other things through Boy Scouts and every summer, there was a week (sometimes two weeks) at Bear Paw Boy Scout Camp in Mountain, Wisconsin. When we had enough scouts in our troop, we would have our own campsite; otherwise, we'd share with the Marinette, Wisconsin troop, whose scoutmaster was the Marinette police chief, and one of my dad's best friends. Best of all, my dad wanted us to have fun, and didn't press us to win awards or anything. One year, we competed against the Marinette troop for last place. That was fun. When I was thirteen, I was eligible for a staff position, and got it. Unfortunately, that was the summer that my mom died.

Within bicycling distance of our home were two good-sized rivers, the Menominee River and the Cedar River, both feeding into Lake Michigan, which was a bit of a trip, but one that we made by bicycle every now and then. The Menominee River was the larger of the two rivers, and fairly rapid. Some of my friends were afraid to try to swim across it, and it was a scary thing to do because about the time that it seemed like I couldn't go any further, it was as far to go back as it would be to continue forward, and the current would take us downstream a few miles before we could get across. We weren't supposed to try to cross the river and dad would sometimes read newspaper articles about kids who had drowned in the river but, in an area where I knew pretty much everyone, these dead kids were never anyone I had heard of so, frankly, I figured he was making it up.

Cedar River was not as large, but it was a wild river. Very few people lived along the Cedar River. It was very rocky, and the current was much more rapid than that of the Menominee River. There were a few falls on it, and the banks of the Cedar River were brushy and stony. No one that I knew played along the Cedar River. We did build a raft once that we floated down the Cedar River, portaging it around the larger falls. Although white water rafting was not a sport then, that is largely what it was. We rafted all the way to where it flowed into Lake Michigan, then called my dad to come get us. There were three of us, and both of my cousins wouldn't dare call their fathers to say they were in Menominee, fifteen miles away.

I am sure there are those who do but I don't think that kids, for the most part, play outdoors anymore, except for maybe in organized activities such as sports or camping trips. In many parts of the country, it is no longer safe to allow your kids to do some of the things that we did, which were not necessarily safe, but there was little or no fear that anyone was going to harm us.