Casually avoiding death, part one

This week’s Boneyard tale comes all the way from Tucson Arizona, written by our man over there, Mr Howe Gelb.Take it away Howe….

JOBY DAVIS

Joby and I were best friends as boys. His Air Force dad had passed away before I met him, at the time when my dad was unavailable because of divorce. We lived in a new development of homes between a farm and the river Susquehanna. A railroad track lined the perimeter, and we learned how to jump the train to ride it where we needed to go. The one-legged girl at the public pool didn’t have to say anything to warn us of what could happen if ya ever slipped. It was always a roll of the dice.

Joby and I loved camping and fishing. Pennsylvania was a paradise for it.

Since my dad was raised in an orphanage, he never had those experiences, but would always take us to, and drop us off, wherever I said I had it figured out.

One time was beside a two lane road in the middle of a thick forest. (Pennsylvania literally means ‘William Penn’s Woodland’.)

Dad agreed to pick us up a coupla days later at the same spot.

Looking back on it, I can’t even think how that could have been possible, let alone why he believed I knew what I was doing. Another roll of the dice we would ever make it back to the same spot.

Around the age of 14, Dad agreed to take us to Canada for a mythical pike and muskie fishing trip.

A lake lodge just beyond the St Lawrence River.

It was a long drive for kids, but we were rarin’. We arrived after dark and early the next day.

Job and I headed out, alone, together on the motor boat. We attempted to survey some of the lake, and to figure where the lunkers would hide. First, we found ourselves where the lake emptied out, and had to guess how close we could safely get near the outlet and its small waterfall dam. This is where we tested the the power of the outboard motor in regard to the current that would sweep us over the falls. An inexact science. The daily roll of the dice.

Maybe, now that I think on it, there was something to the fact that Job would be so daring because of his dad being taken from him so young.

There was some similar behavior when I met John Convertino the year after his dad died.

John would often dare the fates by walking on dangerous edges over cliffs, bridges and buildings. When a boy loses his father, the idea of joining his dad again might be a subconscious impulse. Or, more likely, some dangerous episodes just don’t compare with such a great loss to a son.

Job aimed the boat in the other direction, and we trolled for most of the day, but got nothing. We figured we had the wrong lures for the big fish and headed into a cove for bass instead.

The cove was treacherous with its myriad of fallen trees just below our hull. I would keep watch over the bow for submerged trees and yell to stern-man Job to quickly pull up the motor prop so as not to get hung up or damaged. No one would be coming to help us way out there. Once we made it through, we were so excited about the perfect conditions now at sunset with the mirror calm water.

The fish were jumping.

A few hits kept us hypnotized there, when we realized, too late, our dilemma.

We usually were aware of how quickly night falls in the woodlands. But the water tricked us.

Now, we were doomed. We had to get outta there the same way.

So slowly…

If we got stuck now, we would be there all night.

It took too long to traverse.

By the time we hit open waters, it was pitch black.

That ride bonded us, like all the other dangers we put ourselves through, without fathers to inform beforehand. We were motoring at full speed in that blackness, unable to see the difference between the lake and the sky, or for that matter, the shoreline where juts of rocks lurked.

During that long ride back, we never panicked because we had each other. We would never show fear, because neither wanted to be the weaker one.

We joked and sizzled with excited nerves while we kept plunging into the black ink of nothingness.

There was the occasional dim light on shore from a probable cabin. No lights on our boat at all. The final puzzle was how we might determine where our lakeside lodge was and the waterfall at night that waited for two dumb kids to overshoot the runway. The dice were tumbling.

I can’t tell you how we figured it out. I don’t know. Maybe we were guided by ancestors or the spirit of the lake itself, but we managed to pull into our dock to the surprise of everyone there.

Dad played it cool like he didn’t know better. Thought we must’ve known what we were doing. But the staff of the lodge were visibly startled. We shrugged it off with stupid smiles. Mostly embarrassed that we had no fish.

These kind of adventures in our youth mounted up. But the most consistent and dangerous of them was in our back yard, the daily hang-outs 40 feet above our wide Susquehanna on the railroad bridge we called The Black Diamond.

There was no cat-walk on our bridge. No safe way to walk it. Just the steel rails and wooded ties surrounded by steel girders and that’s it. You had to walk on the ties or balance on the rails and not fall off the sides or in between the ties. Falling off was death. No one could survive that part of the river with its’s maniacal current, undertow and whirlpools. The waters were deep, muddy and polluted. Still, we ignored that, because our peers were kids our age or older a year or so. We treated it like it was just normal doings, and none of our parents ever knew where we were every day and those weekend nights.

We would hang out on the second cement support that we would stupidly call ‘the second pier’, and it also had no guard rails. The drop was sheer and unforgiving if you fell off. If a train came there was nowhere to go but on one of those cement supports and wait.

We would learn to smoke up there. Attempt to drink. Figure out how to fight. And each of us would fish from that insane height.

When you would be lucky/unlucky enough to snag a giant carp, you would then have to walk it in by dangling on the outside girders of the bridge handing your rod to a buddy clinging to the next girder and handoff till ya reached the trestle at the shore line. Then you would slide down the coal embankment and be able to bring the fish in at the shore.

The waters were too polluted to keep the fish, so, most times, some older kid would blow up the condemned carp by shoving an M-80 into its mouth.

We lived on that bridge, and casually avoided death daily.

Tune in next week, folks, for Part Two of Howe Gelb’s childhood chronicles.