Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that kids sit around these
days staring into a hand-held device or talking into it. At least, the boys are
not drag-racing, daring one another to climb to the highest branch of the
tallest oak tree around, or wading into bayous looking for snakes. And the girls
are not accepting rides from a stranger who looks like the loser in a Charles
Manson look-alike contest.
Oh, I know grown men aren’t immune to the “hold my beer and
watch this” type of challenging the Grim Reaper. And women still marry
boyfriends who have beaten them senseless in the past. Choosing poorly is the Great American Pastime. Just look around.
But for the total abandonment of any sense of mortality, you
have to hand it to young boys of past generations. They’ve even been known to
tie themselves to young bulls to prove their manhood.
Yes, I said, “tie themselves to young bulls.” It’s not a “tale
told by an idiot.” No, if fact it was told to me by my late father-in-law. It’s a tale told about
ordinary young boys afflicted with the common masculine syndrome of temporary
idiocy. In other words, typical young boys of the Arkansas Delta.
Seems Julius—that was my father-in-law’s name—and some young
friends grew bored, sometime maybe in the 1930s. It was during the Great
Depression after all and paid entertainment was practically unheard of in the rural
farmlands of our state. The Internet says that less than one percent of children
could afford cell phones back then, so that must be true. Boredom ruled.
I suppose it was after crops were “laid by” or the
miscreants would have been busy chopping cotton. I don’t think there was an “app”
that located free farm labor back then.
What to do? The declaration, “I’m bored,” spoken by a young
boy is probably second in destructive force only to “I dare you.” These boys
were fairly eaten up with boredom, as they say. So, they attacked the delima with their deepest level
of concentration, a depth only measurable by electron microscope. We can almost hear the collective "Hmmm." Well, most
families had a few cows. This led to calves. That led to young bulls, and that
led to the image of cowboys riding grown ones. Now wasn’t that something?
One must understand the workings of an adolescent male mind to comprehend what follows. For that mind, there is no concept extant that
involves linear thinking. There is simply a lightening-like flash in the brain
that says “do.” A better angel called “reason” is shunted aside like a Gideon
Bible at a beer-bust. The mental journey from cowboys riding bulls to let’s
ride a calf was shorter than a reach across a small table.
Turns out, though, that riding a young bull wasn’t that
easy. Each lad tried. Each lad failed. Each lad’s mind began to ease away from
the effort to a less demanding way to entertain one’s self. Of course, one lad
didn’t see it that way.
You know him, he’s the kid when we were growing up who would
make a stink bomb out of a ballpoint pen and a match and set it off in Study
Hall.
Yeah, he’s the very one.
“I’ll ride the son-of-a-bitch. Find me some rope.” That’s
all it took. Danger is no problem for a young boy if he is not the one about to
face it. Within minutes, they had the largest of the young bulls fastened in a pen,
the daredevil astride him with legs tied beneath the creature’s belly.
I can’t do justice to the telling of what happened next, and
my father-in-law is no longer with us to do the job. Let’s just say the episode
ended with a calf pen nearly destroyed, a young daredevil covered in cuts and bruises,
a defiant young bull, and a band of accomplices, having finally removed the
ropes and set their friend upright, lighting out for their respective territories.
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