Do you ever think back to your childhood and wonder how you survived? Growing up on Sand Mountain, we were always doing crazy things outside and normally always unsupervised, and not just things like seeing how high a tree we could climb or swimming in the old coal mines.
Did you ever play Mumbly Peg? All you needed was a pocket knife, a knack for eating dirt, and no common sense at all. Opponents would try to flip the knife from certain body points, and if it stuck up in the ground, they would go again. The first to successfully flip and land the knife from their hand, elbow, shoulder, chin, nose, and eyes (yes – eyes), was the winner and got to drive a wooden peg into the ground and the loser had to dig it out with his teeth.
Our favorite electric fence game (and it’s sad to realize there were more than one) was to line up to pass the current. Imagine four or five kids holding hands and one of them grabbed hold of the wire of a live electric fence. Amazingly only the kid on the other end was shocked. That kid would scream and let go making the next one scream and let go, and so on.
How good was your throwing arm? Here’s how we put ours to the test. Every time we found a huge hornet’s nest in the woods, we would gather up a sack of rocks and see who could hit it from about 50 feet away. Once we discovered who the best pitcher was, we then discovered who the best base runner was, because once you hit that nest, those bees were more than a little peeved.
We would try to find hills so high and steep that we knew we could never climb them on our dirt bikes. But that didn’t matter; the goal was just to see who could make it farthest up the hill before we lost control and would come tumbling back down and the motorcycle with us – or on top of us.
We grew up with B.B. guns, flips, bows and arrows, pocket knives, hatchets, clackers, and lawn darts. We played Flies & Skinners as we hit baseballs as hard as we could at each other. We played tackle football. We played Red Rover and tried to run over or through each other. There wasn’t a creek or river we wouldn’t swim in, a vine we wouldn’t swing on, or a double-dog dare we wouldn’t take.
You could call us daredevils. You could call us careless. And you could even call us Idiots. Yes, I think that’s the word that describes us best.