Ahh, the bicycle stories; but sometimes, we didn’t even need them to have an adventure… some of the things we did led up to them, however…
One of my campout cronies for a year or so was Jeff Dolci; at the time he lived only a few hundred yards from our Area of Operations on Red Cypress. At the intersection of Red Cypress and Highway 182, as a matter of fact… and we had some crazy fun camping out and chasing parkers! One day we spent several hours working on our bikes to make them as silent as possible; grease or oil on any part that might make a noise as we snuck up on our un-suspecting targets… we were so devious in our own innocent way… LOL!
Setting the scene for the rest of this story, the border of the property where Jeff lived, along Red Cypress, had several sections of bamboo; there were openings between these sections of several feet, which allowed a view onto Red Cypress, and allowed easy access back and forth. It also allowed a place to hide from view of the vehicles on the road, which was a major factor in the flow of events forthcoming in this story…
During cane cutting season, there was a steady flow of cane trucks coming from across the river; for those who haven’t seen it, in South Louisiana in the fall they are everywhere. In the old days there were cane grinding mills on every plantation; the cut cane would be loaded into trailers, several hooked together in a train, then towed by a tractor to the local mill to be ground up and processed into molasses, which was loaded onto a barge on the adjacent bayou to be transported to a larger mill up or down the waterway to be processed into sugar, etc. Over time, with the advent of bigger trucks and better roads(!) it became more efficient to transport the cut cane from the fields to the larger refineries via tractor-trailers and large haulers containing several tons of cut cane.
So, they would come from across the river, then have to stop at Highway 182; then they would have to cross the highway, slowly accelerating their 20-40 ton loads back up to speed… needless to say, this took a while… so one day, while watching this process, one of us (who knows, eh?) came up with a crazy idea… Hey, by the time they get across the highway, they’re only going maybe 10 miles an hour; we can run out there, grab ahold of the bumper, and hang on while skidding on our shoes, until we feel we need to let go and run back off the road! WHAT? So we lay in wait one day; the anticipation was agonizing… would they see us? Would they stop? Would they call the police on us? Would someone else see us and call the police? I say agonizing, but if you knew us back then, there was barely a second thought that we had that overpowered the excitement of the adventure.
Here he comes; across the highway; grinding through the gears, slowly getting up to speed… as soon as the tractor is sufficiently past our location (we HOPE!), we sprint out to the rear of the trailer and find a hand-hold; squat down low enough to overcome the friction of our shoes, and hang on, sliding on the concrete, adjusting the angle of our legs so that we can continue sliding down the road as the truck accelerates! The next problem is immediately apparent; when to let go? It is a fine line that only YOU can decide; of course, the competition component comes into play; who lets go first!!! If you let go too soon, it is easy to run to a stop as the truck continues down the road. On the other hand, if you hang on too long, you cannot run fast enough to overcome the momentum, and risk doing a face-plant onto the concrete roadway! Decisions, decisions…
We got pretty good at this after a while; well, you either get good at it, or go to the emergency room, eh? So we up the ante; now we’re gonna try doing it on our bicycles, so we can get more of a speed rush out of the exercise… and one day, all the chickens came home to roost, so to say.
The truck comes by, and we ride out together, on one bicycle, who knows why!?! I’m in front, and grab hold of the bumper; off we go, accelerating down the road… finally, I feel that we are going (almost) too fast, maybe 45 miles an hour, I let go… and as the truck slowly begins to pull away, for some reason Jeff decided to put on the brakes… and coaster brakes on bicycles are not intended to be used at these speeds, eh? So the back tire locks up, and I’m thrown over the bars onto the road; then the bike, then Jeff, is thrown down onto me… and we come to a grinding, agonizing halt. OWWWW!
After un-tangling ourselves we made it back to Jeff’s; and upon inspection of my injuries, there was a hole ground into my back wherever a muscle crossed a rib… not pretty… but doctor Ricky Rochel showed up, and he had a cure! He had Jeff go into the house and find some Mercurochrome… and proceeded to throw it onto my back with enthusiasm… I remember sliding on my back along the ground like a dog with an itchy butt! After recovering from this procedure, I finally made my way home…
At that time, one of my parents (and mine) good friends, who had been a Para-pelagic from his High School days, Marion Roland, was sharing my room with me; he had gotten sick and was not able to be on his own at the time, so we had set up a hospital bed in my room until he recuperated. He was one of those good people that you meet in your life that teach you that you can overcome bad things that happen to you; I have fond memories of the time we spent together, as he taught me how to play dominoes, and he gave me one of those special dogs in my life, Felicia, that will always be in my memories…
When I get home, Mr. Marion can tell I am moving around in a un-characteristic way; and I begin to tell him about my day; and one of the first stories is the fact that I had earlier in the day unscrewed 13 coat hooks from the back of one of my classrooms; then, the story about the cataclysm on Red Cypress… after he recovered from the fit of choking laughter he had from the stories, he asked me: “Do you think that they might be related?”… and I thought awhile, and said: “You may have a point there…”
The next day I brought the coat hooks back…
To be continued; same life, different story…
© Dewayne P. Blanco 2021
Stories From The Fog 