By JRay Hendricks My wife K and I were raised in small towns. The kind of towns so small that you had to make your own fun. In some strange twist of fate, the metropolis I was raised in, population 500, had at least 20 boys my age and another 15 or so one year younger including my brother Jared. In another kink in the cosmos at least half of us were the oldest in our families. Every day was spent concocting adventures to combat our boredom. We did some messed up stuff. There was a physics lesson every day and each one of us earned our PTED (Pre-Teen Engineering Degree). We became experts in bicycle jump building, rocket trajectory, BB gun windage and slingshot velocity, with minors in police avoidance and small contraption building. You have to acquire two things to survive in an environment like that. The first is that you have to learn to take a fall. Whether from the third branch of Mrs. Louden’s cottonwood tree or from your brother dropping off the roof onto the trampoline and catapulting you into the stratosphere. If you want to live, you’d better know how to land or you can get messed up. The second thing you have to acquire is a certain sixth sense that warns you when things are about to go really wrong. It’s that little voice in your head that reveals a slight miscalculation has been made; suddenly you know one of Newton’s laws, the theory of relativity, some other cosmic force, or just good old-fashioned gravity is about to eat your lunch. City kids have a hard time developing these special powers. They just don’t get the same opportunities small town kids do. Farm and ranch kids however, have these powers on a completely different level. They are the major leaguers in this department. The equipment at their disposal, backhoes, tractors, implements, animals and high explosives, raise the survival instinct bar. Their fun can get really messed up. City kids should take extreme caution when playing with ranch kids. That’s information, Sherry (name changed to conceal the related), could have used. Now Sherry and her husband were city dwellers with country hearts. They did their best to raise their kids right. One of the things they tried to do, whenever possible, was to take their family out to her cousin Mary’s ranch. Now I should interject here that kids come to this world with all different types of personalities. Some are easy raisers while others tend be more challenging. Sherry’s oldest, 8-year-old Nolan, tended to be a little more on the latter side. In fact, hell on wheels would be a fairly accurate description. Raising Nolan had more than worn Sherry to the thin side of sanity. Don’t get me wrong, Nolan had his sweet moments like all kids, but he spent most of his waking moments with the gas pedal to the floor. Innocently, Sherry loaded her car and packed the family for another trip to the ranch. Before long they arrived and the young ones scattered like dandelion seeds as a frazzled Sherry sought some peace and refuge on the front porch swing with her cousin. It wasn’t long before a zip line had been constructed. The cable at the top had been attached to top of the hay shed. At the bottom it was secured to the handlebar of a four-wheeler (I am sure all were in compliance with every OSHA standard for farm yard zip lines.) With a pulley and handle in place, the ranch cousins began making repeated trips down the zip line while Sherry and Mary smiled, approvingly looking on. I know what you are thinking—“This is gonna get messed up,” and you are right but don’t get ahead of me here ’cause you don’t know just how messed up it’s gonna get. Too much temptation for Nolan to resist, he placed himself in line climbing to the top of Mount Hay Shed. Nolan grabbed the pulley and here is where his city left him hanging, or at least he wished he had been left hanging. If he had possessed that ranch/farm/small town/ survival sixth sense, he may have felt the slight, precursory give in the line. It may have not been enough warning to avoid the fall but would have alerted his tumbling skills to divert the impact of the soon to be vertical drop. Unfortunately, Nolan had neither sense nor skill. When the line popped off of the rusty nail anchor at the top of the hay shed Nolan fell. Somehow, he not only fell, but managed to fall head first, and all in full view of Mom and Aunt Mary. Messed up right? It is here that I must reveal that Sherry was and is not only an EMT but a fully licensed paramedic. Working for a big city fire department she had routinely been on the scene of horrific medical emergencies of all kinds. Ragged, worn, frazzled, exhausted and maybe just a little fed up, Sherry, with Mary in tow ran to the hay shed. Forgetting every bit of training she had received over the past 20 years, and ignoring all spine injury protocol, she shook her dazed son by the shoulders and said, “Go to the light Nolan! Go to the light!” Mary, more than a little bewildered said, “Sherry; that’s messed up!” I’m happy to report that Nolan was completely fine. The kid can take a fall, though now and then he does have some quiet moments. Sherry tries not to let guilt ruin the peace of those moments because Nolan can still be Nolan most of the time.
