On occasion I’ve written about unusual ways that me and my early school friends spent our time playing.
One such story wuz about having gram weight lifting contests with land terrapins (turtles) used as the power source. The way we did it wuz to drill a painless hole in the rear edge of the turtle’s shell and tie a string to the shell, then thread the string through a tiny pulley fastened above the turtle, then fasten the other end of the string to gram weights made to be used on a balance scale.
The “winner” wuz the turtle that could heft the heaviest gram weight the highest into the air. The owner of the winner captured bragging rights.
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Well, that story prompted a faithful reader from nearby Green, Kansas, to stop by our morning Old Geezers’ Gabfest and Coffee Klatch, to tell me about another funny turtle story that he recalled.
This story originated decades ago on one of the big ranches in the southernmost Sandhills of Nebraska. The son of the owner, while making his regular rounds on the ranch checking to make sure all the windmills were pumping water for the cattle, noticed an abundance of flat-shelled land turtles near the water tanks.
So, out of curiosity and just for fun, he started collecting the turtles in a long cattle trailer. As his “turtle herd” grew he kept it well fed and watered. Eventually, he had so many turtles that he wuz faced with a problem of what to do with them all.
According to the story, somehow the young rancher came up with an idea on how to cash in on his hoard of turtles. One weekend, he hooked up to the turtle trailer and headed for Denver. Once there, he found a big urban farmer’s market and got permission to sell his country wares.
It turns out that the flat-shelled turtle market in Denver wuz booming. Every turtle carried a hefty price tag, and it didn’t take the Nebraskan long to sell out his inventory.
You might wonder what the big appeal of turtles wuz to up-scale, yuppie Denver urbanites. The surprising answer wuz they wanted to use the turtle shells — with the turtles still alive inside — as paint pallets for personal messages or scenes.
Who would have guessed? The young rancher turned a handsome profit from an activity that would assuredly be illegal in today’s highly sensitive woke world.
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The creative ways to have fun and waste time among rural youth seems to have no bounds. Another youth-prank story that wuz told at the Geezer’s Gabfest is this one.
Some rural teenagers in the northern Flint Hills of Kansas caused quite a stir with a prank they pulled many years back. At the time of their prank, the annual spring ritual of burning off the tallgrass prairie wuz in full swing and the local volunteer fire fighting brigade was on high alert for wildfires.
Here’s what the ornery teens did. They had saved up a bunch of smoke bombs from the previous Fourth of July celebration. Then they went to a secluded vacant old farmstead with an abandoned tile upright silo. One by one they climbed to the top of the silo and dropped smoke bombs into the silo.
Rather quickly a satisfying plume of smoke emerged from the top of the silo and could be seen from any direction for miles around. The sight of smoke immediately started a chain of phone calls to the volunteer fire fighters and they gathered a team and rushed to the origin of the smoke.
Of course, the pranksters were long gone by the time the fire fighters arrived. But it didn’t take the firemen long to realize they’d been bamboozled and they vowed to find the perpetrators.
The story teller said the pranksters kept mum long enuf for the furor to die down and they got away scot-free. However, he did wonder why he and his buddies needlessly climbed to the top of the silo to drop the smoke bombs in. He said the prank would have worked just as well by tossing the smoke bombs through an open window at the bottom of the silo.
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Writing about rural youth getting creative in having fun and passing time conjured up a way I used to entertain myself when I wuz a kid growing up on a farm in the 1940s-50s.
I used to sneak a serving spoon out of the kitchen and find a wet spot in the ground in the shade. Then I’d dig a bottle-shaped hole in the ground about 4-5 inches deep. Then I’d capture either a half-inch long black carpenter ant climbing on a tree trunk of a big pincher beetle that I’d find under a board. I’d drop the critter into the hole.
My goal wuz to dig the hole well enuf that the ant or the beetle couldn’t climb out of it. Sometimes if the bugs were nimble enuf to climb out, I’d find some fine dust and put a ring of dust around the top of the hole. That would make the bugs fall back into the hole every time.
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I’ve mentioned many times about my mechanical ineptness and unluckiness. I proved that again this week. I wuz working on my new raised garden beds using a skill saw. To power the saw, I connected two heavy-duty extension cords. I wuz busily sawing away when Nevah yelled “fire,” and I looked around to see a fire blazing where the two extension cords were fitted together. To make matters worse, the fire wuz squarely on top of a rubber garden hose. So, I damaged two extension cords and a garden hose at the same time.
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Words of wisdom for the week: “‘On time” is when you get there.” Have a good ‘un.
