The Pit: Part II

The Pit: Part I

Slam down the peanut butter and jelly, devour the banana, inhale the entire pack of fruit snacks in a single mouthful…it’s time to roll! Lunge to the backdoor, apologize to dad for running in the house, nudge the screen a couple times to awaken the black lab snoozing on the other side, wait for him to contemptuously move his restive dog-days bulk from the comfort of a shady and cool metallic screen door, and rush to the bike rack.

Ahh, the bike!

Now, few material possessions quite defined a nine year old like his dirt bike. First of all, did he have a dirt bike? Some kids chose ten-speeds, a few had only scooters or rollerblades, one or two were solely skateboarders, some denied the thrill of wheels and spent their summers in basketball and baseball camps. So the pool narrowed significantly right away. But let’s be honest with each other, the real crème de la summer’s crop--rich or poor--had a dirt bike. Now among us brave and noble souls who concentrated our attention on the world of the dirt bike, there were really two tiers.

The top tier had notable characteristics: these were the kids who had the pegs on the back and on the front tires. Instead of a web of spokes, you would only see the svelte blades of five chrome supports jutting from the central wheel to it’s rubber tire. So hot, so hot. These kids had frames that weighed an ounce, exhibited more fancy silver metal, and probably showcased the coolest dragon and skeleton designs a grade schooler could ever want. For them, the brakes weren’t even a question: hand-operated.

I found my place among the prosaic ranks of the simpler models. There were no pegs on my bike. I dealt with a forest of rusting spokes and my parents would have killed me had I removed the red reflectors that screamed “uncool”. My red huffy was a bit heavier than ideal and couldn’t claim much for design. And, of course, the brakes were foot-operated, so I wasn’t wooing any fans on that front. In short, it was a working man’s bike. It didn’t dazzle at the get-go, but it put me in the game and that’s all you really needed. I couldn’t flash it on the blacktop but it was sufficient to make me show up.

Besides, the real beauty came later because here was a world where merit competed vigorously with hardware to establish one’s rank. And maybe that was one of the core wonders of our dirt bike world: a first glimpse at the tug-of-war between having and earning. We learned that some who had still earned. We learned that some who didn’t have were afraid to earn. We learned that some who had couldn’t earn. We learned that to have a little was enough to let us earn alot. These were pivotal lessons that only the philosophy of adulthood can encapsulate in words, but maybe, just maybe, they impressed themselves upon a nascent and untamed thread of understanding that children surely develop earlier than they’re given credit.

But that’s all peripheral, so back to the important stuff...Grab the bike, pop the kickstand, open the back gate, make sure the dog doesn’t get out, close it, and you’re almost there.

One last obstacle: Mr. Krell (RIP), our septuagenarian once-and-future-lawyer neighbor was likely watering the northern half of our driveway and any cars that might be sitting there, so the exit down the side of the house had to be fast and furious. If you’ve ever imagined a bass-voiced crow with a bullhorn grinding away at his own vocal cords with a rusty chainsaw, then you’ve started to imagine Mr. Krell’s neighborhood-rattling throat-clearings. Good lord, those things came less from the bottom of his bowels and more from the bottom of a Rancour’s den! But the real problem lay less in his phlegmy effusions, and more in his loquacious ramblings and insistence on a fourth grader having determined the exact progression of his collegiate and graduate school training, combined with atleast a solid understanding of the economic state of various professions and how that should influence the early workplace maneuverings. So, needless to say, you had to tear at breakneck speed down the side of the house and across the driveway and allow Mr. Krell nothing more than a salute in-passing or you’d surely be roped in for an hour.

Now there was only one more stop before The Pit: Tim Snell’s house to rendezvous with your comrade in bikes.

The Pit (Part I)

If you awoke on a summer morning in my part of eastern Washington state in the late 80's, you were greeted by the warm, dry rays of a vibrant sun prebaking our sub-alpine heights. The air there carried a virginal quality as the putrid fumes of humidity wielded no power and the 2500 foot elevation thinned the molecules. Pine trees salted the air with their cleansing aromas and grasshoppers occasionally contended with the sparrows for a piece of the aural action.

For a fourth grader on summer vacation, this was perpetual bliss. The tetherball courts at the elementary school were empty and no yellow balls hung on the ends of those metal chains. The bells still rang in the school building because the principle forgot to turn them off for
the summer months. Times tables and cursive-writing disappeared into the hazy past. The water balloon fights during the last week of school were over which, unfathomably, the teachers had allowed and even encouraged. The classroom and recess world faded away into a distant memory as the present utopia of summer vacation blossomed before us.

For someone in my oppressed state, wrathful parents never ceased their tyranny so daily chores took precedence over an early start. First, their was laundry to fold in the cold basement where you could actually get goose bumps from the dark chill. Down in that hidden
world, green luminescent letters dotted the screen of our dual floppy-disk drive Macintosh computer in the next room where Below the Root, Snakebite, and Word Munchers capitalized upon their much needed respite from over-eager children and amused parents. If you glanced in there, you'd think Slimer was hiding behind a closet door.

So, there was laundry to fold, there were bathrooms to clean with buckets of hot water and pinesol, carpets needed vacuuming, lawns needed mowing, patios needed sweeping, dogpoop needed shoveling, and flourbeds needed weeding. Oh, the onerous weeds! Day in and day out
those weeds proliferated with a vengeance unrivaled by the ravaging Hun armies. Not only were the bigger ones sheathed in a coat of microscale razors, but the little ones refused to part with their roots and multiplied overnight like the beheaded Hydra.

But once these chores were done, there was nothing to stop a nine year old from reaching his promised land: The Pit.

The Pit: Part II