At the time, throwing rocks seemed like a good idea.
Kit and I were 13 years old. We had a makeshift treehouse in the forest behind my subdivision, a fallen deer blind that we converted into a war room for our exploration ops. Not too far from this was Devil’s Ridge, a 30 foot drop in the forest floor that led to all sorts of childhood mythos: that’s where ghosts were spotted, if you got too close to the edge you’d be pulled off by an unknown force, that once you went down you’d be unable to come back up, that it was a place where an old woman, recently widowed, hanged herself. Being 13, imaginative and measurably stupid, we typically treated Devil’s Ridge with a special reverence, because nobody knew what went on deep in the forest.
That hallowed reverence lasted until the dirts came.
Back then, teenagers who smoked cigarettes, wore jeans jackets, rode minibikes and had actual muscles were called dirts. It was a derogatory term assigned primarily out of fear, because if a dirt got a hold of you, it was commonly accepted among the non-dirt population that he would kill and eat you. And you’d be alone in your suffering, because non-dirts would scamper away to their Atari 2600s and Micronauts before you could cry help. Even if they did hear your plight, well, you were being mauled by a dirt, brother, so good fucking luck and nice knowing you.
On this particular summer day, four dirts were at the bottom of Devil’s Ridge, smoking cigarettes and talking about how they should tweak the carbs on their minibikes to get them to run leaner or the proper way to have bus sex with scads of Jordache-clad 18 year old girls. They were strange creatures, bordering on Yeti-caliber mystery, right up until Kit had his big idea.
“Let’s hit ’em with rocks.”
To me, this was like attacking a nuclear Russia with spears and slush balls. “Why?” I asked. “Are you insane?”
Always the quiet tactician, Kit calmly said, “We have the high ground,” and opened his arms wide to the vast forest around us, subtly suggesting things unseen like tree nymphs were totally on our side. “We could throw a bunch and then get out of here before they even know what’s going on.”
I stared at him.
“I’m serious. They’re at such a disadvantage.” Kit had been watching too much A-Team.
Nonetheless, my critical thinking skills dissolved in the face of such sound logic and my deep desire to be part of something that resembled real adventure. I agreed with Kit’s plan and immediately forgot these teenage apes had minibikes, a working knowledge of everything mechanical and enough testosterone coursing through their veins to wither any false bravado simply by stroking their surprisingly full beards.
Kit and I perched ourselves at one of the ridge’s outcroppings, each with about ten rocks the size of large hail. We stared at the dirts some 30 feet below, who were busy comparing the thicknesses of their bicep veins. We counted to three, stood up, and chucked the rocks down on the horde of teenage cyborgs. I think I might have even yelled something.
The last thing I remember seeing is their heads immediately swiveling and focusing their targeting computers on us as the rocks left our hand. They saw us and we weren’t getting away with shit. In fact, in the space of one second, I immediately felt that we had lost every bit of advantage Kit had sold me.
We spent the next hour running through a suburban woods trying to evade puzzlingly-mustachioed murderers on minibikes. I still don’t know how in the space of 45 seconds they went from smoking Marlboro reds 30 feet below us to 10 feet behind us on wailing death machines, their booming voices telling us that in no uncertain terms when they caught us they were going to fuck our eyeballs out. From that moment on, however, I had a newfound appreciation for the minibike — those things are dynamite.
We managed to evade the mongols by throwing ourselves into a briar so thick and laden with dagger-sized thorns that we literally became invisible. We sat breathlessly and bled onto the forest floor for a half hour. Eventually, without saying a word, we crawled out and eventually made the half hour trek back to our tree fort, which in light of the day’s events seemed lamer than ever.
Tree forts. Christ, are you serious?
We needed hormones, and fast.
LOL I can just see you doing this at that time!
Best one yet. :)