Country Kid Fun

Unseasonably warm weather recently reminded me that country kids know how to have fun. I’d begun thinking about this topic after a visiting eight-year old from the Denver area entertained me with   adventures he enjoyed at a trampoline and arcade business near his home. After he detailed hours of good times performing tricks and challenging friends, I wondered what my grandkids would remember about their country childhoods. Thank goodness, I spied two teens playing a crazy game of either hide-n- seek or paint ball war in between long rows of snow-frosted hay bales along Highway 24. That nudge reminded me boredom wouldn’t affect anyone growing up in our family.

When those first seeds of concern sprouted, I should’ve thought about the farm kid essays I read during decades as a rural English teacher. On many occasions, I burst out laughing either in the middle of class while students read independently and I graded, or I interrupted quiet family evenings with guffaws that made my husband question my sanity. How could wielding a red pen be that much fun?

Nothing beats hay bales for fort building, assault advantages or hiding places in hedge apple wars, or simple jumping exercises. Who needs trampolines when you can leap from one round bale to the next to strengthen your legs and your balance? Add someone chasing you, and the thrill increases. For the less physically inclined youngsters, these objects offer quiet hiding places and comfy posts for cloud watching.

Not only do humans enjoy fragrant bundles of straw, hay, or alfalfa, critters like them too. Rural youngsters often spot red tails or northern harriers perched atop the straw while gnawing at a fresh meal. A favorite story detailed a kid plowing a field and seeing a bobcat snoozing lazily atop giant shredded wheat shapes bordering his work zone. Talk to most folks who grow up on farms or ranches, and even their eyes smile when they tell about about finding a farm cat with a litter of kitten tucked snugly into the hay.

Bales aren’t the only kind of fun country kids enjoy. Hot days lend themselves to unplanned dips in a farm pond or stock tank. Unlike the municipal pool, swimsuits aren’t required and kids can leap in fully clothed if they want. Swimmers might splash and giggle with the family dog or maybe feel stocked fish nibbling at their toes. Mossy bottoms make this a true adventure when soaked humans attempt to exit upright from the water.

Rural escapades don’t end when the sun goes down. Evenings offer opportunities to star gaze or count satellites arcing overhead in dark night skies unlittered by bright fluorescent and neon signs. On warm summer nights, entertainment includes counting and maybe catching flitting fireflies. Who doesn’t love watching a beetle with a blinking tail crawl up an arm or leg? That tickle added to the on/off glow is pure magic.

Hang around country kids for a while, and you realize a word is missing from their vocabulary. It’s the overused modern term—I’m bored. When you live in a landscape that constantly challenges you and allows your imagination to run wild, adventures await 24/7.

Mud’s Blessings

Chinese philosophers are on to something with their Yin and Yang concepts. Light balances dark, silence/noise, joy/sorrow, and in our case, mud offsets dust.

Yes, mud. Icky, gooey, sticky mud. Like cat hair, it latches onto anything it touches, finding its way from roads, yards, and pastures onto shoes and pant legs and into homes. It finds its way into the oddest places—a speckle stuck to a grocery sack, a chunk dropped by the door, a smear on a purse.

Lately, there’s been such an abundance of it that most of us can hardly remember the true color of our vehicles. Next time you drive through a parking lot, look to see if you can identify in-town-only transportation. Country cars and trucks can’t hide. One sported such a coating that chunks finally started calving like ice floes off a glacier. The asphalt beneath that pickup had enough of someone’s former road or field topping it that a gardener could’ve stuck in a couple of potato eyes and carrots and started a nice veggie patch.

Mud doesn’t just coat a car or truck’s paint job. It adds new dimensions to the driving experience. Try being the second or third person to drive down a sloppy road and read the tracks of the vehicle ahead. It’s clear all will proceed smoothly when the tracks follow a straight path in the appropriate lane.

However, tire-wide trails that weave back and forth across the road forming sharp little wedges along the ditch are a heads-up alert. They reveal every minute wheel jerk where the previous driver hoped to level the journey. When you observe those, tighten your seat belt and check for loose items that can fly through the car. Deep ridges formed from ditch to ditch inspire gasps and devout prayers.

I wonder if this is how amusement parks with those tiny cars youngsters love to drive came to invent the track rail that keeps those vehicles on the road. As moisture-laden soils dry, unfortunate country drivers hit tire-grabbing gouges that derail pickups and sedans into the Grand Canyon of ruts.

 

Those trying to escape such bone-rattling caverns on an icy morning may find themselves fender to fence post up the nearest incline or launched into a patch of green wheat. It makes a person think similar conditions had much to do with the formation of the still-present tracks on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails.

Fortunately, farmers and ranchers have a handle on this situation. Not only do they own tractors to pull stuck vehicles out of morasses of waterlogged soil, most have multiple pairs of dandy boots—knee-high, rubberized footwear they can hose down after tromping through deep slime to feed and water livestock.

Mud isn’t only miserable; it multiplies work. Cattle, pig, and horse owners schedule extra time to feed and care for animals. This mire also increases drive time to town. Road crews know their real work begins when it dries. Housekeepers and janitors cringe, thinking about the extra vacuuming and scrubbing. One day of sludge makes it obvious why farmhouses have a mudroom.

But! Yes. But. Lack of mud means lack of moisture. It means blowing dirt. It means watching rooster tails of dust hang forever airborne when someone drives down a country road. It means no green wheat peeking from furrows, no milo, no sorghum, no soybeans, no corn, no rippling creeks, no fish to catch, no wild flowers.

 

Lack of mud suggests no life for many of us who love the prairie. I best buy some muck boots, extra vacuum bags, and start counting my dirty blessings. 

Weather Forecasting: A Miserable Job

Weather forecasters have a miserable job. On one hand, they predict impending catastrophic weather and save lives. Think of residents if Oklahoma who made it to shelter before devastating F5 tornadoes bore down on their neighborhoods and businesses. On the other, these same experts frequently predict impending catastrophic storms and the cell fritzes out, leaving the audience to compare yesterday’s hero to the boy who cried wolf. It’s a dilemma.

Not surprisingly, erratic weather has made Kansas weather announcers gun shy about making firm forecasts. One of my favorites grinned as he explained he was in the business of stating what might happen, not necessarily what would. Recent blizzard reports certainly had viewers wondering whether our favorite storm team was on target or if we had cleared milk, bread, and toilet paper shelves at local markets for no reason. I heard more than one person questioning the forecast when it didn’t arrive as soon as announcers said it might.

When this storm actually hit and blowing snow coated to our windows and doors, I recollected blizzards I’d either read about or lived through myself. As recently as a couple of decades ago, I don’t recall getting much warning about whiteouts that slowed travel to a crawl or shut it down entirely. I remember times I drove twenty miles  to work on clear roads in the morning and found myself unable to tell if I was actually driving on asphalt and not in the ditch during an unannounced, sideways-blowing-snow,  two hour marathon home.

This brought to mind a favorite Mari Sandoz novel 80s and 90s era students read. Each year, I assigned Winter Thunder in January or February so readers could relate to High Plains weather’s ability to change quickly. Every one of my kids paid close attention to this tale of Nebraska Sandhill schoolchildren who got on a bus to leave their one room schoolhouse at beginning of a snowstorm.

During the course of the story, class released early, in hopes kids would beat the storm home. Unfortunately, their bus overturned and caught fire as the whiteout roared to life. The young teacher, a 16-year-old student bus driver, and the rest of the children faced freezing to death as they escaped wearing only standard winter clothing and carrying that day’s lunches.

Sandoz based this weeklong survival tale on her schoolteacher niece’s experience in 1949. The gripping narrative detailed kids and teacher blindly clasping the person in front of them as they followed a fence line into willows where they sheltered until rescuers found them days later. Imagine every edgy child’s survival story you’ve read or watched involving frozen limbs and starvation to consider how frightening this was.

Thinking about this turned my mind down another bunny trail as I recalled a carload of Ellis teens lost in a blizzard in the late 80s. If you weren’t on a search team defying Mother Nature’s nastiest as you tried to find these youngsters, you were praying for children, families, and rescuers. The element this event shared with Mari Sandoz’s Winter Thunder was that before events turned into a life or death matter, no one had an inkling such a powerful storm was moving in.

Now, when my favorite weather team tells me to prepare for the worst, I do, knowing very well that their forecast will probably be wrong. I’d rather re-plan something than begin a trip thinking I had nothing to worry about.