During my early teen years, the summers were a time of laziness (except for the jobs, which took only part of the day) and being useless. I’d help around the house, which wasn’t a big deal, but for the most part I just engaged in a number of activities, none of which got in the way of doing just nothing. Beginning at about 12, I started to read in earnest. I’d read any novel I could get my hands on — in my house there were, among many standard works, a lot of westerns, mostly Zane Grey. I immediately fell in love with each of Grey’s heroines, and read with great envy of riding horses, drawing down on the bad guys, falling in love, fighting Indians: the standard stuff of western novels of the day.
The real fun was hanging around with my neighbor buddies and finding stuff to do. We played a lot of mumbly peg, or “root the peg.” This was a game played with a two-bladed pocket knife in which one had to flip the knife and get it to stick in the ground. There was a pre-set sequence of hand tosses and finger flips you had to achieve without a miss — about 15 tosses in all. We’d play until only one player was left without finishing the sequence. That player had to “root the peg,” which meant digging a short stick — about three inches long and a quarter inch in diameter — out of the ground with his teeth. The non-losers of the game got to use their knives to drive the peg deeply into the soil, usually about an inch deep, so getting it out with your teeth wasn’t easy. How well I remember being the loser my share of the time. Dirt in my mouth and up my nose while the other players hooted and made fun of me. But if you lost enough you’d get good at digging dirt with your teeth, spitting it out and going back for more until you reached the peg and pulled it out. You can imagine that several games with six or so players could last through half a day.
Actually, the smell and taste of dirt — earth, that is — is okay. If you’ve never tried it, you wouldn’t know. There’s something about the feel, taste, smell of earth that is elemental. Anyway, after rooting the peg I’d go rinse out and take a big drink from the garden hose and go back for more. But you need to understand that I only lost part of the time; in fact, I was better than most. Such was entertainment in those days. No TV, electronic games, computers, skateboards, stuff that today’s kids have for amusement. Just knives, slingshots, apple trees, wrestling, going to Joplin Hollow, and the rest.
We would roam the neighborhood, climbing trees in the local apple orchard when the apples were not quite ripe, running foot races, sometimes playing touch football . . . you get it: we did a lot of nothing and that was huge fun. But the real deal — I mean The Real Deal — was sleeping out on someone’s front porch on a warm night, laughing with your buddies. Most often, it was my front porch. Four or five of us, sometimes more, would get parental permission to “sleep out.” Everyone would bring a quilt or blanket from home sometime shortly after it was too dark to continue our game of Capture the Flag, we’d pile in side by side, think up games to play and ornery stuff to say, until we’d fall off to sleep with an adventure yet to be had: going to the railroad. At about 3:30, we’d get up and quietly, with the sultry night laden with airborne reminders that we lived in the “chemical city,” walk about a mile to a low cliff that overlooked the C&O Railroad at the South Charleston freight yard. From there we would watch the trains below, chuffing back and forth, until the time — I think it was 5:20 — that the famous Fast Flying Virginian passenger train came roaring through, going westbound toward Cincinnati. Oh Boy. That train was like a rocket. Big engine with thirteen or fifteen streamlined passenger cars, each emblazoned with the words “Fast Flying Virginian.” And each car with its own special name. Easy to understand: it was a thrill to imagine oneself riding on that train to some distant city. On some nights, we would wait a little longer and watch the George Washington flyer going eastbound. Then we’d sneak back to the porch and sleep till someone woke us — often my Dad coming home off of midnight shift. And he always frowned. Imagine that! After his summers as a kid on the Greenbrier river? C’mon.
We never really tired of that adventure — sleeping out, capped off by the magic of the railroad and the steam locomotives — stinky, noisy, powerful, fast, mysterious, as they pulled their streamlined passenger cars through the night to exotic destinations.
Actually, the sleeping out wasn’t so much about sleeping out as about the railroad and the trains that provided us with dreams and excitement. But just sleeping out was good in itself, and we didn’t always go to the railroad. Railroad or no, it was a great way to spend a summer night, totally oblivious to all but the immediacy of the moment itself: young boys being just that.
When we became 15 or so, believing ourselves wholly adult and mature, we were disdainful of such juvenile stuff as sleeping out and watching nighttime trains. New fish to fry. Too bad, that; I’d do it tonight if my body would permit and I had a boyhood companion. And if there were still steam locomotives. It was just that good. I’ve slept out time and again — and yet again, since those days, beside whispering streams and roaring rivers, in warm weather and cold. And often at night, lying on the ground or cot, I’d think about those warm nights on someone’s neighborhood front porch, and smile.