“Let go Lee! Drop!”
“I can’t; I’ll fall!”
Smack! Lee face-planted into the tree.
Take a trip with me to an easygoing little street in the neighborhoods of South Provo. The houses have a dried-out shoe leather quality to them. The people are much the same. They would just as soon water their lawns by hand, and in the fall they rake each other’s leaves. The air has secrets in it. Schools out, there’s way too much energy available, and there’s nothing left to do. I don’t remember who’s idea it was; we were all collaborators though. Leave it to a gaggle of bored nine-year-olds to think a zip-line’s a good idea.
Allen had a fantastic backyard. The trees were like leafy parapets of an abandoned castle. A rusted out van was the carriage under the archway of golden branches. The peaks of the castle towers was the perfect place for our project. Michael was a “big kid” from across the street. He always had some sort of junk cobbled together into contraptions too varied and useless to define. This time it wasn’t so useless though. Bicycle handlebars and a plastic pulley can do amazing things with the right application of imagination. Jordan’s dog ran ruts in the ground around the stake he was tied to. I’m not sure where the dog was while we were using his cable. My contribution was a set of obsolete snow chains that made a marvelous ladder. The blueprints were more mental than print. The planning consisted of, “We should build a zip-line!” followed by several resounding, “Yeahs!” It wasn’t long before a board, resembling the solidity of a dead fish, was nailed to one of Allen’s trees about twenty feet off the ground. We tied the cable to the tree just above our platform, stretched it almost to the ground, and tied it to another tree as far away as it would reach. I cannot, for the life of me, remember how we stuck the pulley to the handlebars. We may have used spit for all I know. But there it was, in all it’s splendorous, horrifically questionable glory: The Zip-line. Oh, what a beautiful invention! A goosey little nine-year-old could feel truly free as he rocketed through the air, holding on until the very last second until he had to let go to avoid the tree at the end of the line. We never thought to put down a pad of any kind down. All we were thinking of was how much fun we were having. My Mom didn’t believe we had actually made a zip-line; she had seen our inventions before. Our flying machine made of cardboard, plastic wrap, and a fan; or our time machine made of Christmas lights and a bed frame. She had this uncanny ability to make our equipment malfunction on it’s maiden voyage every time. Anyway, it was all fun and games until Lee showed up.
Its astounding that nobody was hurt sooner. Lee was a bit younger than us, and a bit slow to boot, but when the threat of, “I’ll tell my mom” pours out of another kid’s mouth you start cutting deals. After no small measure of begging and threatening from Lee, we finally consented to let him ride The Zip-line. Thinking back, his awkward midget-like steps up the ladder seem like the banging chimes of a clock-tower just before your carriage turns into a pumpkin. “Hold on really, really tight,” we told him. “One, two, three, go!” Off he went. But one important detail had been left out. We didn’t tell him how to stop. All at once everyone screamed at the top of their lungs, “Let go Lee! Drop!” Being small and stupid his only reply was, “I can’t, I’ll fall.”
Lee didn’t let go. Lee didn’t drop. Lee’s face was all over that tree like ugly on a moose. If ever you want to stop quickly, smacking into a tree is a good way to do it. We told him to walk it off, but I doubt he could hear us past his own wailing. Again, it’s uncanny; the ability mothers have to ruin fun. Maybe it’s my fault for telling her about Lee’s near-death-like disaster. When she finally saw it, she might as well have shot a disintegrator ray at it. The Zip-line was no more. All this hullabaloo only lasted about a week, but oh what a week.
In a town on a street where life is what happens while you’re busy doing other things, sometimes drastic measures are necessary to compete with boredom. We didn’t just compete with boredom; we obliterated it.
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