Since you’ve heard bits and pieces, I should gather in one place an honest account of my bad deeds that were done before I was of legal age. By the mercy of God I escaped justice.
Pine Bombs
With pine sap and flat sandstone rocks you can make an explosion in the woods, and when you’re 13 you really really want to. This is perverse joy for teenage boys, who like loud noises and seeing how things break or blow up.
Flat rocks. Build a little rock house out of these, on the ground, with four sides and a roof, and fit all the stones together as tight as you can. Flat rocks and not fat rocks, not round rocks. Sandstone is best, it seems to explode most suddenly instead of cracking slow.
Collect a big glob of resin from the bleeding wound of a conifer trunk. Probably where a branch was torn off in a storm. I just said “conifer” but that was for the scientists – they were all “pine” to us. We always said “pine sap”, but to others it might be “resin”. Pine resin, then. It’s rocket fuel. I wish I could be more scientific for you here, but all we knew was to search under the great boughs where the old needles carpet the forest, and look for twisted and broken limbs and where they tore from the trunk, where their armpits used to be. You might find years of coagulated resin that bled from the wound. It seemed like one year’s resin would clot with a skin, then each successive year the tree would weep again on top of last year’s flow, so you’d find large magma flows that had inched, layer on layer, down the bark of the main trunk.
Don’t think liquid. We’re not talking here about those sissy drips of clear maple syrup you saw on a documentary about Vermont. “Globs” is the right word: semi-solid balls, dark colors flecked with gold, with a crust you can touch but do not touch, because just beneath the thin crust is sticky, sticky jelly. Use a stick to collect it. Fill your sandstone house. Glob it. Glob the resin in the middle of your little rock house, on a flat rock for a floor. Cover it with pine needles. Lay on the flat rock for a roof. Sandstone on all sides of the rocket fuel.
Drop lit matches through the tiny gap you left, right over the resin glob. You’ll know when the resin catches fire. Wait. It will soon explode. Probably. And that’s it. Troop home through the woods with a joyful heart.
I’m willing to admit that a 60 year old memory might have dramatized itself a bit but when I say “bomb” I mean a crack so loud it would shush the birdsong. As far as I know we didn’t set the woods on fire or sabotage anything made by hands. And Pine Bombs is not a recreation I can recommend to my son. Or any son.
It just seems a shame for such engineering knowledge, once perfected, to die. So, there, I hand it along.
I was a teenage thrower of things. But it started earlier; I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love to throw balls, rocks, berries and nuts, apples, tomatoes, mud balls, snowballs – any small sphere I could find or make. Just for the challenge to hit a target. It was a fascination I tamed into legality about age 17 but never really lost. I just got old. Age makes the throwing motion creaky and painful, so nothing is left of that, except these anecdotes.
Let’s start small; there are usually signs, in a life of crime, which if caught earlier might have set the scofflaw on a better path and saved, well, property damage.
I couldn’t have been older than 6. A few houses down our street was a dentist office. Around back, behind our house and his office, the alley was paved only with small gravel. There was a window in his office. I picked up a gravel and threw at his window and shattered glass in all directions.
I say it like that, like I’m watching a video recording of another person, because I don’t have an inkling of my thought process, or why I did it. I would analyze the deep psychic pathways behind this for you, but there’s nothing to analyze. Rock. Window. Throw. I still can see that rock piercing the glass, but no memory after that, till the next scene, which is me walking with my dad up the sidewalk to the dentist office. I confessed, the dentist was kind, a monetary reparation was agreed on, and I paid for the new glass from my allowance.
This is all mildly amusing now, and you can see I write it to extract any comedy that might be found, but serious things happen in children’s souls even when they don’t know it. Justice, but also reconciliation. Damage is costly and must be undone. I internalized those words before they were words. I faced my crime and found that I didn’t die. I can’t claim perfection in living out these – lessons? values? – but I can still feel a layer of moral fiber inside me that dates from the Episode Of The Dentist’s Window. Now, this layer is more vivid than my recall.
Then there was the Episode Of The Cherry Tomatoes. On the interstate, at night.
Before computers, teens used to ride aimlessly around in cars. I’m in the right rear seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, a tiny car. Four of us fill all the seats. The car belongs to the driver, an older guy who should have known better, and soon would. We’re on an interstate highway after dark. I doubt we were going anywhere specific.
I have no memory of how or why I had a supply of small cherry tomatoes on my lap. It’s not like we would set out to throw things at cars. These things weren’t planned.
But there was highway construction on this stretch of road, which meant the traffic coming toward us, usually across a median strip away from us, was now routed into a two lane bottleneck at full highway speed. Car headlights were zipping past on our left. And the window over there was partially down. You see my problem?
To hit a still target is fun. To account for movement, to lead a moving target, that’s fun, multiplied. To hit a moving target when you yourself are moving is, well, it takes my breath even now. And to hit a moving target, while yourself moving, through the aperture of a rolled down car window, across the width of the dark car and across the lap of who was sitting to my left – you can understand why I couldn’t pass it up.
I’m not sure anyone in the car knew I was throwing tomatoes out the window at the oncoming headlights, at least for a few volleys. But it seemed to become clear when, minutes later, headlights came up from behind us like we meant something to them. The fast swell of headlights at night in the glass behind your head, along with a blaring horn, is not something you misunderstand.
We managed to escape, somehow, and I escaped my own driver’s anger, and we all went home safe to forgetful beds. Until the next day.
It was Saturday, so no school. My usual Saturday haunt was a community recreation center, which was a large gym with ping-pong, pool, and other pastimes to keep the youth in our town off the streets and out of trouble. And, conveniently, that’s where the driver of our car found me right after the West Virginia State Police found him. They had his license plate number, apparently.
Fast forward again, since I’m clearly not writing this from prison; the deal that had already been made was that the State Police would not arrest the owner of the vehicle if the perpetrator would wash the victim’s car. I was transported, and not consulted.
I found myself at some place with a water hose, and a bucket, and soap, and an amazingly graceful man who just wanted to watch me clean the perfectly placed tomato splotches from his front windshield.
I did. And that was that. You’d think I’d take a lesson from that. That would require earnest reflection.
There was the Episoide Of D. And Her Bike, And The Apple.
I’m sitting on my pastor’s side porch, and there’s an apple tree in the yard, and little green apples littered in the grass, and across the alley in the church parking lot D., a girl my age who attended said church, is riding her bike in circles. We’re teens. She’s not popular, she’s not my friend, I don’t hate her, but what I see on that bike is not a person with feelings but a moving target. Prey.
It’s farther than your mental picture of it. It’s a long throw for me, and I”d have to lead her, and time my release just when she’s in that arc of her circle when she’s facing me, right before she turns sideways to cross from left to right.
There’s a second or two after you launch a long throw at a moving target that feels like that instant you’re unwrapping a Christmas present, right before you can see whether the present is what you asked for. You don’t look at the flying missile – that’s bad technique. Your eyes stay on the target. All you can do is watch, in a zen state of utter calm. Time stops.
I can still see the apple bounce off her head. Not the bicycle, not her shoulder, the exact top of her head. That throw was perfect to the inch, I tell you. And time sped up and caught up with me – the crying girl, the bouncing apple, and the mad dash around the house to hide.
I hope it eases you a bit to know that D. didn’t fall off her bike. I’m not sure how much it hurt her because I didn’t stay around. I had never thought it through to a possible success. It was just the challenge of the throw I was after.
Again, however, I found myself ensnared in the legal due process I so deserved. This time it was D.’s mom, in her living room, with D. sitting there. Arranged by my helpful pastor.
To my credit, I didn’t mumble or make excuses. I apologized straightforwardly, in my own words, to D. and her mom, and all seemed to accept it as honest (which it was) and adequate to the crime.
You’d think I’d take a lesson from that.
I’ll shorten further Episodes; I don’t want to give the impression these are good examples. Nor are they funny – well, a little funny, but only now, and only to the degree I am the butt of the joke. Which I don’t mind, but…let’s save space.
The Episode: Show Me Your Hands. I was walking along the sidewalk near my house, on a suburban street, on a summer evening. With a friend. The town police car pulled up behind us and burped his siren to startle us and over his loudspeaker encouraged us to stand still. (We did.) He pulled up alongside with his painfully bright spotlight in our faces. I could see nothing but white. “Show me your hands.” (We did.) “Have you boys been throwing eggs?” No, we said. Did he think we’d break eggs on our hands and just leave yellow yolk there? I still puzzle over that. After an interrogation and our “no, sir” denials, he drove on, convinced we hadn’t thrown the eggs that night on people’s porches. (We had.)
This is where you should be disappointed I hadn’t fully internalized what my dad tried to teach me about the dentist’s window.
The Episodes of Dogwood Berries. Dogwood trees were everywhere in yards in my town, and in early fall they put out bright red berries about the size of the smallest bullet. And hard. The trees are full of them, you can collect sandwich bags full of them, in minutes, on your way to the football stadium for the first home game on a Friday night.
We’d take seats high up in the bleachers, where we could look down across rows and rows of heads. At an eruption of cheering noise and thrashing of hands and hats, everyone on their feet, we’d throw handfuls of hard dogwood berries down across the crowd. I still can’t understand how we didn’t get caught and beaten to a pulp. But we didn’t.
Then there was the time I shot the neighbor’s aluminum front door, what we called a storm door, with my new bb gun. I was in our back yard, shooting through an archway under a rose trellis, across our street. The boom from the aluminum was very satisfying. When the neighbors came over to find the shooter, I lied and denied. My mother stepped up and denied that I could have done it. Years later, as an adult, I confessed to her that I had really shot that door. “I know”, she said.
Then I think of the day we made mudballs and threw them down the alley from our tree house. A long arc, as we imagined intercontinental missiles, raining down on unsuspecting population centers. The strategic target was a gaggle of girls in a driveway – and their boyfriends. Perhaps, again, not clearly thought through. We won the footrace to my front door to escape the boyfriends, and took one relaxed breathe in my living room before the boyfriends broke in after us. We defended ourselves with the points of umbrellas, and drove them out the door.
Then there was the time my buddy and I, older teens now, were walking down a street, in the middle of a winter day. Snow was deep. I was oblivious to why he bolted off in a dead run till he yelled “run” back to me, and I glanced over my shoulder to see the full-grown man sprinting toward us. Angry. It didn’t take a second to grasp that my friend had hammered his car with a snowball without me seeing or hearing it. I escaped a serious beating by winning a foot race in snow. A more serious foot race. I think it was that day i realized I was no longer in the child’s moral universe, where your worst penalty is embarassment. The adult moral universe holds far more pain. At this point, after about 16 years on God’s green earth, I began to learn accountability.
These are amusing tales. But consider how life could have gone differently. What if that driver had startled by that tomato explosion in front of his eyes and gone off the highway at 60 miles an hour in the dark? Did he have children? What if D. had wrecked her bike and cracked her skull, or became quadriplegic? These are not far-fetched possibilities. Such tragedies from seemingly slight causes happen every day. We can seldom see God’s hand looking at present or future days, but looking to the rear we can see the landmarks align. I was preserved, like many a fool, by the mercy of God.
But I was not living an accountable life. That realization didn’t dawn slowly but came crashing down on one night.