Dang, sounds pretty much like my childhood. I would ride my bike the 7 or 8 miles to the beach early in the morning on the weekends,with my Buddy, and we would stay at the beach, swimming and playing all day, and then ride home, and get home in time to shower, and get ready for supper. Sometimes, I would ride my bike down to Lantana road, and take my gig, and gig gars, before they finally filled in the drainage canal that ran along side of it. We used to have tomato fights and cucumber fights at one of my friends farm. The best one was at night when we broke into the packing house, and had a ball, then we were banned from there for awhile, for the five hundred dollars damage we did.
That was the only time we ever did any damage to anyones property, and it was not intentional. But when you had a BIG cumcumber coming at you at 100 mph, you tend to take cover wherever you can, even if it is in a stack of boxes!
My buddy whose Father and Uncles owned the farm, had an unbelievable arm. He was one of those guys who had a natural strength. At night we would have fights, and we would build forts out of the two by two tomato stakes, and have tomato and cucumber fights. You always knew when "Jack" threw a big cucumber, or tomato, you cold hear it coming through the air, and you immediately hit the deck! Then you would hear that sickening smack, and his cousin Roy scream out and cuss. We were just thankful it wasn't us. He could out throw all of us, and I had a decent throwing arm. He could throw half again as far as any of us could. We would have BB gun fights, off of ponies, and then behind the diesel drums, and whatever other structures we could find. After awhile the brain kicked in, probably as the results in all those nasty red spots breaking all over, and we figured we had been pretty lucky, not to have shot someone's eye out.
I used to make Co2 container bombs out of black powder, and a six inch cannon fuse, and rubber cement to seal it, and we would use to get fish, and such, and night it would shake the ground, and there would be a flash you see, and in the day time it looked like depth charges going off. Then one of my buddies, decided he wanted to make them also, so I showed him how, and told him not to wait, just light and throw as far as he could, well he ended up blowing off his thumb, and part of his index finger of his right hand. His cousins, said he just was staring at it, and then it went off. He says to this day he doesn't know why he didn't throw it, they were all yelling to him to throw it. He also has a piece of metal in his chest, near his heart. We would hunt Meadow larks, and take them home and cook them. They were good. So are Robbins. When I was a little boy about five or six, I remember sitting under a big Brazilian Pepper Tree, with my dad, as he proceeded to get enough for supper, with my BB gun.
We would sneak into a cow pasture that had deep drainage canals, and locks, and we would catch a stringer full of BIG blue gills, and sunfish, and stumpknockers, warmouth perch, and such. Not to mention some great tasting catfish! Seldom wore shoes. When I was about five, we lived on a shell rock road, and we would run barefoot on it, and never think anything of it. Not now!
Wayne
