The Leap

I think I would try to get back to normal today if I had any idea what normal is. It tends to change from day to day. One doesn’t feel the void that a person could leave in one’s life until that person is gone. Then that void begins to attract every aspect of your being like a physiological black hole. It takes a while for the whole system to recalibrate. Then you get ready for the next upheaval.

If there has been one reliable constant in my life, I think it might be instability.

Well, enough of that. Onward and upward. Did I ever tell you about the time the Hester boys, Robert and Bobby Joe, and I got one of our most grandiose ideas and carried it out until we got caught?

It happened this way.

Somewhere back in the 1950s, they built a stock-car track about a half-mile up the highway from our little grocery, in a large flood-plain area. It flooded too often for most legitimate uses, so a race track seemed appropriate. This was years ago. There’s a Walmart there now.

Anyway, we, the Hester boys and I had a chance to see a travelling daredevil show there one Sunday afternoon, after church. That is to say, after church for me, the Hesters were free from human bondage at the time and weren’t burdened with church services until a woman at the Methodist church in town discovered that fact. That’s a story for another day, though.

Come Monday of a summer day, we found ourselves still mesmerized by the thought of the Sunday show’s grand finale, the jumping from ramp to ramp by one of the crew over three or four cars parked side by side. Oh, the exhilarating thrill!

How to translate such grandiosity into our rural lives became a fixation. We inventoried our status. We had no cars, but we had bicycles. We had no ramps, but we had the remnants of some oak lumber my daddy had inherited for payment of a delinquent bill. We had hammers. We had a saw. My daddy had nails and a generous attitude about our use of them, whether he knew it or not.

Almost instantaneously, it seemed, we had two ramps propped on bricks on the seldom used gravel road that ran alongside our house and store.

It worked. With enough speed, we could make the journey in mid-air from one ramp to another. We widened the distance and soared. We widened the distance again. We widened the distance again and again, until Bobby Joe hit the far ramp with a tire and went somersaulting down the road. We set that as the ultimate distance and took turns making the “Leap of Death.” That might have left us with no future save a career in daredeviltry had we not gotten bored. Young boys do that.

Someone noticed my little brother sitting in a muddy ditch playing with a crawdad house. It must have been a scion of the Dark One himself who gave us the idea. A true Leap of Death required a potential victim. In a flash, brother was laid out perpendicular between the ramps and we were making a truly death-defying leap. It was most exhilarating, and I was mid-air in my fourth or fifth leap when I saw, at the end and to the side of the far ramp, my daddy. As my bicycle continued to soar, I looked around. The Hester boys had disappeared, with me still in mid-air.

Did I ever tell you why I never became a daredevil?

A career cut short?