Random Thoughts of Kurt Shinn

We had a snowstorm the other day, and while I was driving down the road and trying to keep my car on my side of the road, it reminded me of one of the favorite activities of my youth – skeeching.    In my youth, after my friends and I would get done with our snowball fight, or building an igloo, we always spent a little time skeeching.  There was an art to skeeching.  Not everyone was good at skeeching.  It blended the skills of timing and speed with a good pair of shoes with no tread.    For those of you unfamiliar with skeeching, it involves a child running alongside an unsuspecting  moving car, grabbing onto the back fender and letting the car pull you down the street.  To a 6th grader, its a lot of fun and the frightened reaction on the part of the driver is the best part.  The exhilaration of hooking onto the bumper and getting a good slide was unexplainable.

Now that I am older, I think about those poor drivers who suddenly saw a 10 year old boy in their back window holding onto the bumper of the car, realizing that neither stopping nor speeding up was an option.  Skeeching is no longer an accepted sport among adolescent boys – Thank God.  I suppose that better sense now prevails – or perhaps its because cars no longer have bumpers.

The days of skeeching reminded me of some other dumb things we did.  Flaming tennis ball is a good example.  We would soak a tennis ball in gasoline, light it on fire and kick it around the garage.  I often wonder which part was the dumbest of that activity:  1) Playing with gasoline, 2) lighting the ball on fire or 3) kicking a flaming ball around in a closed garage where there were lawn  mowers, cars and other flammable machinery.  That game did not end for my friends or their parents very favorably.

On the 4th of July we would stand on either side of the street and shoot bottle rockets at each other.  This was not my idea. But it was fun to see how close you could get it to your friend – the target

All these things happened years ago in a different type of environment .  Even though they would be frowned upon nowadays, there are other dumb activities that go on today.  Ice Fishing for example.  Fishing is not that exciting to begin with.  Add to it sub freezing temperatures and its even less attractive.  People say its a great social event.  Frankly I think socializing inside is a lot more fun.

Hunting -another activity.  A gun represents the ultimate power over a human being – let alone an animal that has a brain the size of a walnut.  Sitting in a tree for hours waiting for a deer, though, makes me wonder who the one is with the tiny brain.